Shaun Illingworth: This begins our second interview with Professor Lloyd Gardner on April 17, 2008, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with Shaun Illingworth ...

Rabeya Rahman: ... Rabeya Rahman ...

Thomas Frusciano: ... Tom Frusciano ...

Eric Knecht: ... Eric Knecht.

SI: Thank you very much for coming in today. The first question I want to ask is, is there anything that maybe the last interview stirred up that you want to say beforehand?

LG: [laughter] I can't remember the last interview. I mean, I'd have to have a transcript in front of me to tell you that; no, nothing that's been sticking in my mind, no.

SI: To begin, we would like to go back and ask you a few more questions about your childhood. You told us last time a little about how you grew up. Your father was a honey producer in Delaware, Ohio. You used a phrase, that that introduced you to, "The cruelties of the marketplace." I was curious what you meant by that.

LG: No. What I meant by that was that, when my father went into a nursing home, we had occasion, my sister and I, to review his correspondence. ... While he, in the tradition of gentlemen of that generation, did not really talk about finances with his children at all, I could see, in his correspondence, his effort to organize this cooperative association. ... What he used as the example of the kind of the cruelties of the marketplace to the independent producer [was], when up against great chain stores, like A&P and so on, they were able to drive individual price bargains with small honey producers, who simply did not have the scale to package and label and market their products in any way that would get them a decent price. That's what I meant, and his appeal to independent beekeepers around Central Ohio to join this cooperative was based upon the vagaries of the marketplace and the difficulty of surviving in the marketplace. My political opinions were already formed at that point, which is interesting, because I didn't come across this until much later, ... as I say, when we were putting my father in a nursing home, a very traumatic kind of situation. ... What was interesting to me was that, despite his ability to point to the vagaries of the marketplace and how it hurt individuals, he was a lifelong Republican. My mother was a Democrat, but he was a lifelong Republican and forced my mother to listen to him read, at night, columns by Right-Wing columnists out of the Columbus Dispatch, and so, I always thought that was interesting tension.

SI: I was wondering if it referred to the fact that farms have bad years and good years.

LG: Oh, there were those, there were those. I mean, we were like any agriculture-based industry. We were highly dependent upon the weather, ... or my father was, I didn't do anything, and, if the amount of rainfall held down the clover crop, then, there was trouble, in terms of producing honey. ... The other thing, of course, was that, during World War II, when sugar was rationed, my father was regularly called to Washington, DC, as one of the managers of the largest cooperatives, to testify before Congress on price controls and sources and so on, and many people learned how to cook with honey in World War II who had never touched honey. One of the problems with honey is that it doesn't dry out and, if you try to cook something that's supposed to dry out, honey will keep it moist too long and this is a problem. [laughter] So, I can remember him trying to develop recipes for honey, which they wanted to put [in] a honey cookbook, and he would do these at home, with my mother, but, at the end of World War II, when sugar became available easily again, then, of course, the price of honey nosedived. ... So, in that sense, we were war profiteers, [laughter] not very much profit.

SI: You were just a young child prior to Pearl Harbor. Do you remember the Great Depression at all? Did that have any impact on your family?

LG: Oh, yes. There was something called the Civilian Conservation Corps, three "Cs," and, at one point, we took in a young man, he lived with us for a short while, and I remember my father saying he had been in a CCC camp. I didn't know what that was at the time. It wasn't until I got to high school or college that I learned what the Civilian Conservation Corps was. ... I remember them saying that, and he lived with us for a few months. Why? I don't know. I was too young to know why. ... You're talking about the Depression; one of the things that's absolutely true, and you'll see it in this new television show, if you ever watch it, Mad Men, which is about Madison Avenue, and so on, and it flashes back to the 1930s, and it flashes back to a time when the hobos, or vagabonds, whatever you want to call them, marked houses. ... They were able to do this on trees or something else and say, "This is a friendly house. This is not a friendly house," and so on, and so, ours was marked as a friendly house. My mother never turned away anyone who needed a meal. ... Often, I would say maybe once every two or three months, for a period, toward the end of the 1930s, when I was only four or five, these people would come asking to do work. ... The show Mad Men has it exactly right. They would come and do work and get a meal or twenty-five cents or fifty cents, which was an hour's labor at that time, you know, and considered decent, and she would feed them in the kitchen. The only stipulation was that, while I could watch them working, from the house, she would not allow them to eat in the same room with me. So, she had a little bit of fear of what we'd later call pedophilia, which was perhaps exaggerated, but she didn't fear for herself at all, not at all, and so, that was one aspect of the Depression I remember. Another was that, at that time, there were people who came around and did things like knife sharpening, to earn a few pennies, to earn a little bit of money, and this didn't come up again in my life until much later, when I was working on the book on the Lindbergh Case, [The Case That Never Dies: The Lindbergh Kidnapping (2004)], when one of the mysterious figures in the Lindbergh Case is a knife sharpener who comes around. ... People really didn't relate to that, but I did, because I remember a knife sharpener coming to the house, my mother giving him some knives. You know, today, it would be thought, "This man is planning to slit our throats," but, then, not at all, and he was from that part of Greece known as [Macedonia], disputed part, between Greece and Macedonia. ... He had a thick accent and a thick mustache and a beret and he was known, locally, as "Macedonia Mike" and he would come around, with his little wheel, emery wheel or whatever it was, and foot pedal and sharpen your knives. So, that was the second thing that I remember about the Depression. The third was, ... this was toward the end, I remember the day that ... World War II began, in September of 1939, and I can remember asking how well the Poles were holding out. It wasn't a very long war, in that part, in 1939, before Russia and Germany crushed Poland. So, all those things come back from the 1930s.

SI: In your household, had whether or not the United States should get involved or not been discussed?

LG: No, that was not a debate. I don't know why. Maybe they just didn't talk about it when I was around, although I discovered, again, after my mother's death, a letter to my father, written in 1917, in which she was quite critical of Wilson for taking the country to war in 1917. Now, I don't know, I don't think, all those views held for World War II, because, on December 7, 1941, I was reading the comic pages in the Sunday Times; Sunday Times, no, no, Sunday Columbus Dispatch, and sitting near the hot air register, keeping warm that way. ... Suddenly, my father leaped up from the radio and went charging out to the kitchen, saying, "Hazel, Hazel, the Japs have attacked Pearl Harbor," ... but I don't remember any big debate before that.

SI: Before we get into World War II, can you tell us a little bit about the town and what the community was like?

LG: I don't know if everybody regards their hometown as idyllic; I did. It was a town of about eight thousand, swelling to ninety-five hundred or ten thousand when Ohio Wesleyan was in session, and it had a class structure, but no millionaires, so that the wealthier people were not that distant from the less well-off. We were somewhere in the lower middle-class region, because even though my father owned this business and so on, he was plowing all the money back into it, all the money. So, I can remember him bringing out blueprints, saying, "Oh, we're going to have this house, we're going to have that house," and so on. He's going to build this house, move it back on the property. We had a lot of property and, no, that never happened, but the class differences were not that great, in that sense. I remember asking my mother, "Are we poor?" and she would say, "No," and I would say, "Are we middle-class?" and she would nod, "Yes, we are middle-class." Well, that's the common American [response], no matter what, ... [laughter] but I remember, very well, that we were one of the last people to get a refrigerator. We had an icebox well into my high school years, and the kind of town it was, also, ... the kids would run along and run in back of the ice deliveryman, who would use these huge tongs to carry twenty-five, fifty pounds of ice on his back. ... Whenever he saw the kids coming, he would always chip a little ice off in the back of the truck for us, and he'd let us ride in the back of the truck for several blocks, if we so wished. It was that kind of town. Now, we grew a lot of our own vegetables and so on, and my mother canned all summer long. Boy, that heated up the kitchen, when you go through this canning process, how difficult that is and so on. My wife's mother also canned fruits and vegetables and so on, and you'd live on those all winter long, so that your purchases at the grocery store were fairly small, bread, potatoes, meat and so on, but your vegetables, fresh salads, no. Of course, those were the days ... before you had strawberries year-round or anything year-round. At that time, there were seasons for things, in the grocery stores as well as at home, and, in the spring, a farmer would come in, with a wagon and horses, and plow your garden, because the gardens were large, if you had enough property, and we did, at that time. Our property abutted part of Ohio Wesleyan's campus, as a matter-of-fact, went all the way back. Ohio Wesleyan later bought up a piece of property off the back of ours. ... The town had many, many beautiful, still does, brick houses. There was a brick factory in the town, so, you had absolutely gorgeous brick houses, essentially Edwardian houses, early twentieth century brick houses, really beautiful things, and they still are. I love to go back and look at those, and those have all been purchased now by yuppies from the great metropolis of Columbus, twenty miles away, which used to be a distance. We used to think of, "Delaware. Country. Columbus," and, now, it's all megalopolis, all the way, yes. So, that's changed incredibly. A friend of mine, who wrote a book about his father in Delaware, had interviewed many of the people that we knew as young kids and so on, and he said, "Many of the people could do all they had to do within a four or five block range where they lived," go to the store, pay your bills, go to the bank, and so on, and it was nice.

SI: Were most people in town, like your father, tied to agriculture in some way?

LG: No, no, very few, I would think, and we always looked down on the country folk, [laughter] called them "hicks" and so on, and most of the kind of fights that went on in grade schools or high schools went on between two groups, either between the town and country kids or between the whites and blacks. There was a black ghetto down one street, South Liberty Street, and I remember, one time, playing football with a bunch of [kids]. I mean, you know, long before Pop Warner and all this stupid stuff, we would organize games, big games, football, and we were playing one game one time and this kid came to play with us and he was the first black kid to play with our [group], played with us or against us. God, he beat the hell out of us. I mean, he was just great. So, I went up to him after and I said, "Can't you come out to my house for dinner, say, tomorrow night, next night?" So, I went home and I said, "I invited Jack Miller to come to dinner," and they said, "Oh, that's fine. Where is he from?" and I said, "Oh, he lives somewhere up on South Liberty," and they said, "Oh, all right, you can do that this once, but no more." ... So, Jack, meanwhile, had said to me, "Are you sure you've talked to your parents about this?" We had the table set, he never came, ... but Jack was a good friend all through high school, and then, he went on to be a really, heck of a good player in high school.

TF: Did you ever ask him why he did not come to dinner?

LG: No. That's a good point, but I didn't, and I think it was because we didn't have that kind of relationship. I mean, we had a, "How are you?" that kind of stuff, and so on. It's a good point, but I didn't ask him why he didn't come, because, I guess, he must have sensed what my parents thought, and so, for me to bring it up and say to him, "Why didn't you come?" would have raised more issues, probably.

TF: Did not need to be said.

LG: Yes. Now, I'm not trying to talk about this as being a seething cauldron of racial [issues], but, remember, in this town, in the 1930s and '40s, blacks could not go to the municipal swimming pool and they brought a lawsuit on that and won. They sat in the balcony at the local movie. There was maybe one or two barbers in town that would cut hair for them, outside of the Liberty Street area. So, while I say it was idyllic, it does not mean it was racially just, in any way. I'm talking about idyllic for a young boy, growing up, becoming master of the town. You didn't have to have a car. All you had to have was a bicycle, go great, long distances on the bike, up to the one end of the town and [back to] the other within ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. It's idyllic.

SI: Were there any other divisions in town, like Catholics and Protestants?

LG: Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes. There was the Catholic Boy Scouts and the Protestant Boy Scouts, and you know that this was a kind of thing, but all the Boy Scout troops tended to be harbored in churches. So, for example, the one troop that I belonged to was harbored in [the] Methodist church on one end of town and another troop that some of my friends belonged to was harbored in the Methodist church in the north part of town. The north and the west were the two good sections, the east and the south were the two bad sections. East is where the Catholics lived, [laughter] south is where the blacks lived, north and west is where the Protestants and whites tended to live, although there's a lot of overlap. ... My uncle was married to a Catholic. He had been divorced a couple of times, then, he was married to a Catholic. I don't know how she got on in the Church that way, being married to a divorced man. So, I saw him very seldom and never saw his wife. He would come to the house and so on. He was my mother's youngest brother, [laughter] and she'd die if she knew I was saying this. I was told that he died of a heart attack at age forty-seven, and so on, and so forth, and the funeral was held in a Catholic church. ... I remember, you know, you see all these jokes, I was scared to death by that crucifix, you know, right above you, in the center of the church, staring down, and ... I remember that vividly. That was the only time that my mother condescended to go into that church and, of course, he was buried in the Catholic part of the cemetery, the consecrated part, apart from all the rest of our family, but I had been told, as I say, he'd died of a heart attack at forty-seven. My sister later told me he'd actually died of a venereal disease that he had contracted while out West, and that's something that, you know, in England, the grand tour for young men was to go to the Continent, where you were to be made into whatever, in a sense. In Central Ohio, one of the things that young men did as grand tours [was] go West, go out to the Western states, and come back after doing whatever you did out there. Now, he contracted venereal disease out there and it came back and came back and came back. It finally killed him, with complications, obviously, but, you know, your parents are never going to say, "Your uncle's got venereal [disease]." [laughter] You know, that's not going to happen.

SI: Were you involved in any other organized activities as a child, aside from the Boy Scouts?

LG: I didn't say I was in the Boy Scouts, did I?

SI: I thought you said you were in the Boy Scouts.

LG: I said there were ... Catholic Boy Scouts and Protestant, but I was. [laughter] Other activities, oh, yes; you ever hear of the Order of DeMolay?

SI: No.

LG: All right, we'll talk about that in a minute. I was in a high school fraternity, PGP. Previously, it had had Greek letters, Pi Gamma Pi. What these stood for, I never remember, from the initiation, but it had gone to PGP because the school authorities began to crack down on high school fraternities and high school sororities. ... They grow up in places not simply with colleges in them, like Delaware, but it's much easier for them to grow up in [those areas], because [the] Ohio Wesleyan campus was ninety-nine percent fraternity or sorority. So, this watering down to high school was quite natural. The girls' sororities were the Arrow Society and Omicron Kappa Gamma, or OKG, and the high school fraternity pledges were chosen, what they said, on social maturity and so on. Well, nobody came around my freshman year in high school and I began to see these little things, [pledge pins], and I wondered, "What was this? What was this?" So, I began figuring out what it was and, essentially, figuring out what you had to do to be asked to join. ... I was asked to join, finally, my junior year in high school, and then, the high school really cracked down, ... or the school system, in general, really cracked down, and eliminated them altogether, because, I think it was right, they said they were divisive, socially. They fostered elitism. Ah, that word today, elitism. [Editor's Note: Dr. Gardner is alluding to recent attacks against Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama that derided him as an elitist.] God forbid we should have a President who's an elitist, but, at any rate, it did do that, so, we had to abandon that. We met informally after that, a little bit, but, when that was crushed out, that fraternity, a lot of us went over and joined DeMolay. I'm surprised nobody here in this room knows DeMolay, or Rainbow Girls? Nobody knows either one of those names? Surely, you know the Masons, the Masonic Society.

SI: Yes.

LG: DeMolay is a junior order of Masons. It's named after a French leader of the Knights Templar, Jacques DeMolay. Now, you know, ... ever since The Da Vinci Code, I thought everybody would know this stuff. I'm shocked, shocked, that you don't know this. So, DeMolay, and we joined, and, ... even through the initiation ceremony, I didn't know what was going on, because they never really told us, and that was that poor Jacques DeMolay is immolated, right. Immolated, that's a big, tough word, you know. What really happened to DeMolay, in real life, was, he was put on a grill and put over a fire. I guess it took him a day or two to kill him that way. ... The Pope and the King of France, at that time, wanted to be rid of the Knights Templar because they were a very wealthy order and they wanted the money, and so on, and so forth, from them. So, it was only after reading some history, later on, that I realized who DeMolay was and why he was important to the Masons and why the Order of DeMolay [existed]. The other neat thing was that it had outfits for its leaders, master counselor, senior counselor, junior, and they all had Dracula kind of robes, black on the outside and scarlet on the inside, you know, satin and so on, secret handshake. We had a certain sign, you know, if you're walking down the street, recognize another DeMolay, basketball team, meeting hall, ping-pong, refreshments, all that stuff, all that good stuff, and that lasted. Then, of course, what they hoped to see [was that] you'll join the Masons when you're twenty-one. My brother-in-law was a Mason, thirty-second degree and all, the ring, you know, with the two eagles on it, or whatever that stuff is on there. He said, "I'd like to be your guide into the Masons," and I said, "Ah, not really interested." So, those were the main high school [activities], but, of course, all the high school clubs, too, key club, drama club, debate. That was ... the single most important thing in my life, starting debate in my freshman year in high school. ... We had a wonderful debate coach. She taught Latin, when she wasn't teaching debate, and we called her "The Old Roman," and she was that. ... She cracked the whip on us and taught us how to debate, how to build a case, how to speak. So, by the time I got to college teaching, I was never afraid of a class. "What's that?" and that's something we neglect. When I came to Rutgers, I may have told you this last time, they asked me to coach the debate team. Did I tell you that?

SI: Yes. It had changed a lot.

LG: Terrible, terrible, didn't care about public speaking anymore. It was just, "Baaaa."

SI: You told us about Pearl Harbor. How soon after Pearl Harbor did war policies, or just the war in general, begin impacting the community?

LG: Ration stamps, draft. My cousin was blinded in North Africa. He was on a half-track and, as fate would have it, he was leaning over to look down at the ground and went over a landmine and he was blinded. ... He was an enlisted man. Another cousin was an officer. Another cousin joined up before Pearl Harbor and was an officer in the Canadian Army. So, in that sense, our family was, in terms of cousins, ... out there. I was much, much [younger]. As I say, see, my sister was sixteen years older than I was. So, these guys were all war age and I was just seven when the war started. So, you had that, and, as I say, rationing. [laughter] One of the big rationed things, of course, was, you couldn't buy caps for your cap pistol and, when a new shipment of caps came in, ... they still made a few, all through the war, ... a rumor would go around kids, all over, and they'd go down to this drugstore which had them, caps and bubble gum. Bubble gum was also hard to find in World War II. They started making soft drinks with, not diet, but with other kinds of sweeteners, "Yuck." Those were pretty bad, and we ate a lot more fish and you had ration stamps and ration tokens, and saving stamps, scrap metal drives, rubber drives, and so on.

SI: It sounds like your lifestyle was already in line with a lot of things the government was trying to get people to do, like canning, gardening.

LG: Yes.

SI: That did not really change.

LG: Yes. You know, victory gardens were a big thing in World War II; we already had a victory garden. We had more than a victory garden, so, it wasn't [a big change]. ... Well, my father was in an essential industry, agriculture, so, he had gasoline, to get to his plant and so on.

SI: How far away was the plant from your home?

LG: About twenty-five miles.

SI: Was it in Columbus?

LG: No, out in an area where there are a lot of Amish people. There are towns in Ohio, just like there are in Pennsylvania, that are essentially Amish-dominated, and some of the Amish worked for my father, at times, and we always learned how to differentiate between the Amish and Mennonites. Mennonites were not as strict as the Amish. They didn't want their picture taken, no graven images, no zippers, at that time. If you go to a farm market now, you see that they have lapsed considerably, in terms of their willingness to use electricity, in the market, at least. Although, ... [in] the farm market over near us, ... they won't use electronic cash registers. They still keep a cash drawer and put it out. What they will use is a scale; maybe it's because it's on a battery or something, that it's not hooked into a current. I don't understand the difference there.

SI: What do you remember about these scrap drives and those sorts of things?

LG: Well, you got different ranks for the more you brought in. So, the more scrap iron you could find, scrounge up, from various places, and pile over there, old stoves, tanks, water things, I mean, all kinds of crap. Whatever happened to that, whether it was ever seriously used or not, I have no idea. ... I have since read that a lot of this was simply to inculcate patriotism, but you got a cardboard thing that made you a lieutenant. Then, if you got so much more scrap, you got one that said captain, major, and so on.

TF: The award system.

LG: Yes, yes.

SI: Was that something you were into? Were you eager to go up in rank or collect as much scrap as you could?

LG: Oh, yes, oh, yes. I've forgotten what the highest rank I got was. I wasn't the highest, by any means, because I wasn't willing to spend all my time going out and doing that, but I collected my fair share.

SI: Did you do it as part of an organized group, like with the Boy Scouts?

LG: Well, ... sometimes, yes, but, also, sometimes, on your own, but you say organized Boy Scouts. ... The other thing, of course, was, ... later on, after the war, when I was in Boy Scouts, because, remember, I was seven when the war starts.

SI: You could not be a Boy Scout until you were twelve then.

LG: Yes. Cub Scouts, nine to twelve, then, Boy Scouts, was that we always had exhibits at the county fair. The county fair was a wonderful time, in the fall, September, and Delaware developed the Little Brown Jug, which is the richest race in the world for pacers, and the Hambletonian, in New York, is the richest race for trotters. Trotting is a natural gait. Trotting is one hind leg and the opposite foreleg. Pacers, both legs on one side go, and then, the other, and it's not a natural gait for a horse. It has to be taught. It's a very pretty thing to watch, but there wasn't any rich race for it. So, some of these people, and you talk about class differences, again, some of these people, who were the more prominent citizens in town, decided that the Delaware County Fair could be a scene of the richest race for pacers, and so, they started it. ... Now, essentially, a hundred thousand people scramble into Delaware on that day. It's really overflowing. It's incredible and it's gone up and up and up, and that's about the only thing the New York Times Sports Section ever covers Delaware, Ohio, for, it's the Little Brown Jug, but the whole county fair went on for several days. ... It was part of the Grand Circuit of Harness Racing, so that it wasn't only the Brown Jug, there was the Old Oaken Bucket, there were two or three other races that they had, and brought a lot of people, because it was Grand Circuit Racing, and a lot of gambling. That was where gambling was legal, at the races, ... but, for the fair itself, the Boy Scout troops would set up exhibits at the entrance to the fair. We always had one, and so, it gave you a chance to sleep out for two or three nights, up at the fair, and that was always fun and go eat your fill of junk food, especially cotton candy, reams of cotton candy, and so on, and other things. Well, one time, we had the exhibit, I don't know why, on developing photographs. We'd take photographs of people coming to the fair and develop them, right there. Well, I put my hand down in developer, which is wet, and I reached up to turn on the red light, ... "Bang," back across the room and on my can. That was the most exciting thing there, but, when I was in high school, they wanted ushers, for Brown Jug Day and other days, and you could get out of high school going to usher, and get paid. So, I went and one of the things that we were told was, "Now, these New York gamblers," they always used the term "New York," you know, as a kind of term of opprobrium, "Now, these New York gamblers will want these box seats and you can't let them in, because the people, the local people and so on, who paid for those deserve them." So, these guys would come up and offer you ten, fifteen, twenty dollars, which was a fortune then, if they could sit in the boxes for just a race or two. ... I remember, one time, one of my colleagues, not me, of course, let some of them sit for a race or two and, afterwards, they got up and tore up a stack of tote tickets, that's what they were, you know, and I looked down there, there must have been five, six thousand dollars just, you know, torn up. So, that was an education, right there, in what serious gambling meant and how it was done.

SI: In your household, the way you grew up, was gambling frowned upon, and other vices, like drinking?

LG: Other vices? [laughter] My sister went into the Red Cross in World War II. She was stationed at Danville, Kentucky, in a place where, what used to be called shell-shocked, but, now, I suppose it would be called post-traumatic stress [patients]; they overlap somewhere in there. Shell-shock was a term that came out of World War I, of course, but she would work with them, and I don't know ... if you've ever seen the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but that was a picture of a veterans' hospital. Wasn't it veterans?

TF: I think so, yes.

LG: I think, very much like what she worked in. Well, my sister went away as a Methodist virgin, non-swearing, non-drinking, non-smoking young lady. She came back, during the war, as a smoking, drinking, and I don't know what else, woman. She came home and she had a bottle of whiskey. [laughter] So, remember, I'm still a kid, basically, so, I don't actually know, ... I don't have a good sense of what's going on, okay. She put this bottle of whiskey out on the table. I'm out playing. I come back in. They're, both of them, drunk as skunks, and my mother is down on the floor, polishing a piece of furniture and humming some song. I thought she'd taken leave of her senses, and then, of course, in a few hours, everything was all right, but it was just funny, I mean, you know, that incident. My sister then quit smoking. After the war, she quit smoking. After the war, she went to work in Chicago, in Hull House, ... on Halstead Street, one of the most famous settlements, missionary kind of [work], not missionary, maybe related to church, I don't know, but she worked there, with the poor, in Chicago for two or three years. Then, she came back to Delaware and worked in the county welfare office. ... Here, you have this staunch Republican father and these two lefty kids that come out of this. [laughter]

TF: Doing social work.

SI: Where do you think that came from, your mother or some other source?

LG: You know, I don't know. I tend to think it came from my history courses, because, when I studied the Great Depression and the New Deal in college, it really shaped [my thinking], really had a powerful impact.

SI: What kind of impact did Ohio Wesleyan ...

LG: Wesleyan. There's no "Z" in it.

SI: Wesleyan, sorry. What kind of impact did the college's presence have on the town, before you went there?

LG: Well, economically, had a very important role, because of all these students coming in, like the men's clothing store, the nice one. ... You know, when the great shift came and boys and girls in college stopped wearing flannels and cashmere blend sweaters and white bucks and went to jeans, the universal thing, it wiped out that clothing store, just, "Woosh," because I was working there, between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college, and all the way through my sophomore year in college. I had been working in a restaurant. Then, I worked there for a short while, until I got so far in debt, buying clothes, that I had to go back to the restaurant, to make it up. But, I saw parent after parent bring their sons in, to outfit them for college. So, those were the days when, you know, you would just sort of stack up the sweaters, stack up the slacks, well, they were being measured, they would be back in there, sport coats, ties, shirts, you know, and they would come out and I would look at the bills. In 1952, a five, six hundred-dollar tab, to start a boy out in college, would be the equivalent of, what, five thousand now? or something like that. I don't know, but they would just buy out the store in the fall and that was the case, and all of us, down on campus, [were] practically wearing the same thing. It's a different uniform. You have a uniform now, jeans and this; we had a uniform of gray flannels, and that's true, isn't it? I mean, it's absolutely true, and gray flannels and white bucks and cashmere sweaters, cashmere blend, not very many pure cashmere.

SI: Would you go on the campus for any reason, like sporting events?

LG: Oh, yes, oh, yes, followed Ohio Wesleyan, but I was a much closer follower of Ohio State, still am, still am. Well, you can't grow up outside the shadow of the great "Horseshoe" [Ohio Stadium] down in Columbus and not be an Ohio State fan, unless you're a traitor, and like we used to sing, "Don't give a damn for the whole State of Michigan. We're from Ohio." So, you know, I mean, that's what I grew up with; took a long time for Rutgers to figure out that it had to have a decent football team. [laughter] I was there from '63 on, through all the bad years.

SI: I just have a few more questions about the World War II era.

LG: Yes.

SI: Does anything else stand out about that time and how it affected, particularly, someone your age, a young child?

LG: Yes, one other thing. Did I mention this, about the Navy cadets being in the dorms?

SI: No.

LG: Well, a lot of college campuses housed military officer training programs. In Ohio Wesleyan's case, the programs were the V-5 and V-12. You remember that?

TF: I know of it. I was not around at that time.

LG: Well, part of the campus, probably the most beautiful part of the campus, had a series of what we called glens, trees, walks, up and down, and so on, to ... what had been a girls' dorm, Stuyvesant Hall, beautiful building, up on a hill, and, every night, the carillon played and that was nice, you know, and then, [at] Christmastime, Christmas carols and the carillon and so on. Well, we would go sledding back in this glen, as kids, and I had a wonderful sled my parents had given me, called, of course, "Black Beauty," after the horse. I mean, it was a wonderful sled, so happy the Christmas I got it, and these walks that came down from the dorm would ice over with the snow, and they were not nearly as careful about getting rid of it then as they are now, you know, long before all the lawsuits and so on. ... So, we would go up there and we would take what we called "The Death Ride," because you come down, and then, there was a sharp curve around, and right in front of this curve was a huge tree. So, if you didn't make that curve, you'd go, "Whack," into that tree. That's why we called it, "The Death Ride." Well, these Navy kids, a lot of them are from the South and there's one who was naturally nicknamed Tex. ... He and I became friends, because we'd go up there with our sleds and these guys would be on the bottom and we'd ride on their backs, going down on the sled. Well, you can imagine how much weight a college guy [added], college age guy, and then, a smaller guy, how much faster [it went]. You'd do all that stuff. So, poor "Black Beauty," I went down on his back when it crashed into that tree, bent the runners and broke the thing and so on. I got another sled, never had one as nice as that, and, again, I invited him to dinner, promised he would come, my parents set up dinner, never showed up, and that made me sad. I cried that night. So, they would march through town and so on.

SI: Did you ever correspond with your cousins, or any other servicemen, during the war?

LG: No. I wasn't old enough.

SI: What about the end of the war, V-E Day and V-J Day? Do you remember any celebrations or just the reaction to the end of the war?

LG: I'm sure there were, but I don't remember anything special about celebrations in town. Maybe there were, probably there were; I just don't have the memory. I remember, one of the big days, always, was Memorial Day, because the Boy Scouts, and then, later, the ROTC at Ohio Wesleyan, marched with the town parade from one end of town to the other on Memorial Day. ... The head of the parade all my growing up was Major Sampson, who was a Spanish-American War veteran. You know, that war was so short, it didn't produce too many veterans, and he was always the major-domo of the parade, rode in a car.

SI: Before you left, basically, for Wisconsin, had you traveled very much as a teenager or a college student, or did most of your life center around that thirty-mile area?

LG: Well, no, no, the debate team traveled all over the country, yes. So, there was that, but, other than that, no, and in contrast to my kids, who've lived two or three years overseas, you know, with us.

SI: Did you choose Ohio Wesleyan just because it was the college in town or were there other reasons?

LG: Debate. The debate coach there wanted me and they were offering a scholarship, and so, this'll really get you, I never paid more than 275 dollars a semester. [laughter]

SI: You can buy a couple books with that money today.

LG: But, you know, tuition wasn't what it is now, I mean, by any means. When I talk to students who have been in my classes, Gillian Curtis, for example, a woman who's in my Middle East class, last year, leaving school with a thirty or forty thousand-dollar debt's nothing anymore. I mean, that's just nothing, and the thought, at that time, in 1956, [of] leaving with that kind of debt would have really scared the hell out of you. Well, my grandson has just been admitted to NYU and they're trying to figure out how to tell him that he's going to be leaving with a very, very, large debt.

RR: He'll get used to it.

TF: [laughter] You do not think about it until after school.

LG: That was the main reason, that I couldn't have afforded to go any other place, but I didn't want to go. I mean, the only other place I would have thought of, at that time, was Ohio State. ... Even though I loved the football team, we always regarded Ohio State as "cow college." I mean, you know, it wasn't, it really wasn't, the medical school, law school, not at all, but we knew it was easy to get into it. At that time, practically anyone who applied got into Ohio State. That's still true, but you would get into Ohio State at Marion or Westerville or some other god-awful little town, where you'd be separated from the main [campus], just like Penn State has campuses all over. So, that was the case there. Later on, when we'd go to alumni things, some of my colleagues, who were also in academics, [were] saying, you know, "Wow, wouldn't we have been so much better off if we'd got into Harvard or Yale?" and the wife of one of my colleagues said, "Look, how do you know you'd have done or been interested in the things that you are interested in if you'd gone to those places? It was fine for you," and I think that's true. The debate team was every bit as good as any debate team in the country, because we debated all those teams, and we won some big championships. ...

SI: Do any of the; do you call them meets?

LG: I'm sorry.

SI: What do you call debates, just debates, or are they meets?

LG: Oh, when they get together? That's a good question, meet? I don't remember what they called it. Actually, it was tournaments.

SI: Do any of them stand out in your memory?

LG: Oh, yes. Carnegie Tech had a big one and they had a different style of debating and so on. We went to Carnegie Tech, with debate teams from all over the country. ... Then, they announced the top speakers and my colleagues on the negative, we were on the affirmative side, at that time, my colleague and myself were on the affirmative, my other two colleagues from Ohio Wesleyan were on the negative. ... They were ranked the top negative team in the tournament, team. ... Then, they named the top speaker of the whole tournament, and I'm sitting there, they announced me. I was shocked. I was blown away. It was great, but we had a lot of triumphs, as debaters, because this coach, Roy Diem, at Ohio Wesleyan, worked us like mad and we practiced. You could take debate as a regular class. First time, it was four hours of credit, three hours of credit, the next time you took it, and then, two, two, two, two. So, in a sense, I practically majored in debate, because I was always in it, every semester, and we would have a couple or three debates, practice debates, a week in there. So, we worked hard, very hard. ...

RR: What kind of topics did you debate on?

LG: Yes, Fair Employment Practices Commission, which was instituted in World War II and had to do with hiring of minorities and so on; recognition of Red China, that was another one; federalizing the United Nations into a world government was another one. ... The topics were announced for the year by the National Forensic Society. ...

RR: The debate, was it L/D, Lincoln/Douglas style debate? No; okay, sorry, I was on the debate team in high school.

LG: You were, but ... you mean, you're talking about a different style of [debate]?

RR: There were four divisions of debate: speech, policy, Lincoln/Douglas and public forum.

LG: Oh, I see what you mean. No, there are different categories of speaking contests. In other words, there would be a debate [and] you would take a whole forensic team. In high school, you'd take a whole forensic team with you. You'd take a debate team with you, you'd take people who were in extemporaneous speaking, where you would go in and you would get a topic and have so much time to prepare, okay.

RR: That is speech.

LG: You did that?

RR: No, I did not do that.

LG: Original oratory, where you would write your own.

RR: That is part of speech.

LG: Declamatory oratory, I've forgotten what the difference there was, between original and declamatory, but we would take practically [the whole team] to the high school meets. ... They were called meets, ... but they were more than just one, they were a whole bunch of schools [that] would come to the place, and you'd take practically a school bus full of speakers to those things. ... The extemporaneous speakers were; that's the one I always wanted to try, but they always carried around so much [material], so many notes, because they had to be prepared for anything, you know. They'd carry around reference books and so on. One classic example, in college, not in high school this time, my partner, for one year, was a pre-theological student, smartest guy I've ever met. Unfortunately, he died a few years ago, George Ross, and he was going to be an Episcopalian minister, but there he was, at Ohio Wesleyan, tall, British-type speaker, ascetic-looking, and, one morning, we picked him up to go to the debate tournament. That's what they were called, tournaments.

SI: Okay.

LG: We picked him up to go to the tournament and he had a satchel full of materials, which he grabbed and put in the backseat of the car. We got to the debate and got into the room. He opened up his satchel and he nudged me and he said, "Lloyd," he said, "I was at a retreat last night. I forgot to put my debate materials in. All I have here are Bibles." I went, "Oh, God," but, [if] anybody could pull this off, I knew George can do it. So, his turn to speak came, he got up with a Bible and he said, "I take my text for the day," and it was perfectly attuned to what the other person had said, and then, he went off in a flight of oratory that just left me sitting there, absolutely stunned at how good he was. ... What I'm trying to get at is that we worked enough so that we could do that.

TF: That was such a core to the Rutgers experience in the early twentieth century. One of the earliest intercollegiate debates took place between Rutgers, NYU and some other schools in New England, took place here, actually in Kirkpatrick Chapel.

LG: And, at Ohio Wesleyan, we used to debate an English team every year, Oxford, Cambridge would come over, University of London, and, of course, these guys, that's a different range entirely. There, the idea is to be witty, you know, and to just absolutely flummox an audience by your wit and charm. I remember, one of the Oxford guys got up one time and said, "You know, I'm so happy to be here." He says, "I'm reminded of what one of my fellow countryman said, that American culture is the only culture that went from primitivism to barbarism without ever reaching a peak." [laughter] Ah, well.

TF: Did you ever debate an argument on the side that you did not believe in?

LG: Well, that's an interesting thing. Some coaches feel it's an important exercise to argue the other side and other coaches felt you couldn't argue effectively if you didn't believe in the case, but I don't think that was very good training for law. You have to argue on sides you don't necessarily believe in. I would say that, probably, we switched, during the year, a couple of times, just to do it, but, by and large, we debated on the side that we thought was right, but we never really got into fights about this. I think that was the difference.

RR: Can you describe a tournament for us, how the tournament was set up? I understand, from my experience, that there are several rounds to a tournament, usually five preliminary rounds, and then, breakout rounds. During the five preliminary rounds, pretty much, the computer chooses if you are "Aff" or "Neg," but I understand from your earlier response that you stayed in one position throughout the tournament.

LG: Very different, yes. Well, of course, there were different forms. There was the cross-examination style, which, of course, is great training for a lawyer, and then, ... some debates would have one rebuttal, some would have two. In other words, two people on a team, first affirmative would speak, first negative would speak, second affirmative would speak, second negative would speak, rebuttal first affirmative, rebuttal first [negative], but, sometimes, it would switch around and first affirmative would speak, and then, the first negative could cross-examine the first affirmative. ... You had to read the rules for the particular tournament beforehand. So, that switched around quite a bit, yes.

RR: It was very different.

LG: It was fun, it was great fun.

RR: Did you ever get a judge that was biased on the position that you were debating on?

LG: ... Oh, of course not, [laughter] of course not, nor did we ever do anything underhanded, like suck lemons while the other person is speaking or anything like that. No, we didn't. We always complained the judge was biased if we lost. We always complained about that, but I don't know that that was ever the case. I do know that, at one point, we almost broke up the team, because our coach, who was an assistant professor, our main coach, stayed home this time and our assistant coach, who took us to this tournament in Indiana, he told the judge to vote against our team, because he thought George and his partner were too arrogant, and George was arrogant. He had a right to be arrogant. He was smarter than ninety-nine percent of the world, and he found out about it. The judge, under examination by George, confessed that he had spoken to our coach beforehand and our coach had said that he wanted very severe criticism of our team and so on, because he felt they weren't working. So, all the way back, in the car, all the way home from that tournament, I thought the team might be doomed, because they were fighting at such a level, "You can't do that to us," and so on, "How can you do that to us?" which was a good question.

SI: You mentioned that ...

LG: You're interested in all this stuff?

SI: Oh, yes.

TF: It is fascinating. It says a lot about you, though. These are the formative years.

LG: Yes.

SI: If we were interviewing a football player, we would ask them about their college career.

LG: Okay.

SI: You mentioned that, at this time, you were reading about the New Deal and the Great Depression and it was starting to shape your belief system. Were any of the debates and the issues you preparing for adding to that matrix of beliefs?

LG: Oh, I'm sure they were.

SI: Okay; nothing stands out particularly?

LG: No, I'm sure there were. I mean, something like fair employment practices, recognition of Red China, those were obviously germane to what I was learning.

TF: During your undergraduate years, when did you get interested in history? [laughter] I would presume that you majored in history as an undergraduate.

LG: I had a double major, English and history, and I was undecided whether to go to graduate school in English or history, after I decided not to go to law school. ... For a time, I toyed around with the idea of going for American studies, but my professors at Ohio Wesleyan told me, I think very wisely, that, "American studies is neither fish nor fowl, and the result is, you might have a harder time getting a job." I don't think American studies, at the time I was ready to go to graduate school, was as big a deal as it became later, and so, I opted for history. ... Unlike many of my friends who had a double major, they would have it in political science and history. I had English and history, so, I always sort of tried to integrate my history into English, and vice versa. ... I did take a minor. In graduate school, you had to take a minor and my minor field was radical novels of the 1930s. When I say minor field, I don't mean you took a bunch of coursework; we took maybe one or two courses, and I took a readings course in radical novels in the 1930s and a serious course in American literature in the nineteenth century. You had to have six hours. Then, you took an exam over ... that minor field and that was pretty easy. That was easy, because I'd had the background in college. It was very pleasant. There was a very excellent English professor there by the name of [Frederick J.] Hoffman, who is [the] one who worked on literature of the '20s and '30s. I can't remember his first name, and the other one was a professor by the name of Harry Hayden Clark, who was given to drawing, ... putting drawings on the blackboard. ... He was talking about Hawthorne's Marble Faun and there's a scene in there where the heroine, who was much put upon, Miriam, is being chased by a figure, a cowled figure, who might be a monk, and she's sort of chased up to the edge of a cliff. ... He started drawing this stick figure on the board and he said, "That's Miriam, can't you see? is terrified, written all over her face?" and here was this stick figure, you know, and so on. So, of course, the class was laughing like mad, and then, he was given to really bad puns. ... One of the first things we had to read was Tom Paine's Common Sense, and so, he came in with this mischievous look on his face and he asked the first student, "Did you enjoy the reading from last night?" and the student [answered], says, "You mean you were getting pleasure out of Paine?" [laughter] So, that was the level. ... You remember him?

PC: Yes, absolutely.

SI: I was reading a little bit about Ohio Wesleyan and I think, either at the time you were there or just before, they cut their last ties with the United Methodist Church. I was wondering ...

LG: What do you mean cut? ... You're right, they were no longer ...

SI: They had cut their official ties.

LG: I'm searching for the right word there. I mean, I know what you say is correct, that, prior to that, they had stronger ties, which required them to have some people on the board of governors or something, bishops from the church, and they had cut that, but, at the time I was there, we had three required chapels a week. Monday was political chapel or something, Wednesday was religious chapel, that doesn't mean we prayed or anything, that means we had a speaker who spoke to religious themes, and Friday was turned over to the students, very often, but you had to go to chapel all four years. Your freshman year, you were allowed so many chapel cuts, sophomore, so many chapel cuts, more and more as you got up there. There was a Catholic church located not too far from what we called Gray Chapel, where these chapels were held, although that was an administrative building. [Editor's Note: Ohio Wesleyan's University Hall, an administrative building, houses Gray Chapel.] ... At eleven-thirty, the Catholic church always tolled, "Bong, bong," and the students started getting restless. As soon as [you heard the] "Bong," feet started shuffling on the floor and so on, and I overheard a faculty member in the back of the room say, "If Jesus Christ were speaking and it became eleven-thirty and that chapel bell started ringing, everybody would want out." We had some wonderful Fridays in student chapel. I didn't go to too many, because I was working in the restaurant, and so, I was excused, because I had to wait table at the restaurant, but I did go to a few. ... There was this absolutely wonderful stunt they pulled. There was this guy named Tiny, and you can imagine, that meant he weighed about three hundred pounds, and he anchored the offensive line on the football team. ... So, Friday, when the student chapel [convened], they were advertising their senior show and wanting everybody to come to it and the chapel was a huge building with a rounded balcony. ... Suddenly, this voice cries out from the balcony, "Where are you going?" and everybody looked up and this young girl, who was a freshman or something, had gotten up and was starting to walk out, from the first row, ... from the balcony. All of a sudden, you ... see a foot go out, she trips and falls. Then, Tiny reaches down and, supposedly, picks her up and hurls her out into the crowd. Of course, it was a life-sized doll that they had placed there, and so, he reached down, hurled her. [laughter] I mean, you can imagine the screams, ... but those were great. ... There are some other things, too, like the snake curator down at the Columbus Zoo bringing snakes up and putting them in the library reserve book room. Did I tell you that last time?

SI: No.

PC: What happened?

LG: Well, [on] the ground floor of the library, the reserve room was on the left as you came in (through a long hallway?), and then, you returned books to the reserve room through a chute. ... That particular evening, the woman who was ... monitoring the reserve book room was the Episcopalian minister's wife, Reverend Putney's wife, and she was moonlighting, literally, working there in the library. ... This guy, who was a junior or senior, he worked down at the Columbus Zoo. ... He was a curator, a reptile curator. He brought up this seven or eight-foot python and put it in the chute, so that it came slithering down the chute. Well, Mrs. Putney had a heart condition. Fortunately, she did not have a heart attack, but some wit out there, I was told this, I was not there in the room, [said], "That'll be twenty-five cents. You're an hour late," you know. [laughter] ... The reserve room emptied, he went in, gathered up the snake, took it up to a sorority house. Now, these sorority houses, at this time, ... post-World War II vintage, were built with no exit from the chapter room, which was down in the basement, just this one [set of] stairs. ... It was down in the basement, and so, it had some of these basement casement windows up there, but no other exit except up through the stairs. So, he opened the door and they were having a chapter meeting and he knew about what time it was going to break up. He put the snake on the stairs, going down the stairs. You can imagine, [laughter] and this one girl absolutely panicked. She went hysterical, getting out one of these casement windows; how she got up there, probably, [who knows]? So, the next day, her father was there at Ohio Wesleyan, "What kind of school are you running here?" you know, this kind of thing. Well, of course, you could do that at Ohio Wesleyan. You wouldn't be able to do it at a state university so well, [laughter] and then, of course, we had our famous murder case, all right. There was this guy there, in my freshman year, named Roy Schinagle. God, he was an obsessive guy. You know, I was in a couple of classes with him, and bowling class, for example. ... If the first ball went down there and didn't make a strike, the second went down there twice as fast, and I would see him every now and then at the local restaurant, and I remember this vividly. My sophomore year, I was in this restaurant, the L & K Restaurant. First year or so, here we were, smart aleck sophomores, first question I asked the guy when he came in, "How's rushing going?" You know, "How is your fraternity doing?" So, he sort of nodded, and so on. Several months later, the police, from Sandusky, Ohio, came down to the town and arrested Roy Schinagle, and took him out of ROTC class, in his ROTC uniform, and charged him with the murder of a young woman by the name of Cynthia Pfeil. Now, he had been dating Cynthia Pfeil their freshman year. He was extremely jealous. He would come up and meet her at the dormitory, walk her to class and walk back with her afterwards, and so on, and he didn't make his grades first semester. So, he made her de-pledge her sorority, because she'd made her grades, and help him with his grades, and he was a pre-theological major. So, what had happened, as pieced together, was, over the summer, she had moved to Cleveland, Ohio. Her brother was working in Columbus, so, there was some tenuous connection. She was from White Plains, New York. She had moved to Cleveland to work in a department store in Cleveland and they were meeting. He was working at a trucking thing. He would go through Cleveland. She got pregnant. So, she wasn't going to come back to Ohio Wesleyan then, because she was pregnant. What she did was, she wrote Roy and said, "I have to come talk to you. I have to come." So, he said, and this is all part of his confession, ... she came into the bus station and he said, "Anybody see you?" and she said, "No." ... He took her down to a shack on the south athletic field, where they kept things like chalk they used for the lines in the practice field, and sand and so on, and he said, "Now, you stay here, don't let anybody see you." Meanwhile, then, he would go back up to the fraternity house and take part in the rushing, in the rushing stuff, and that's when I saw him in the restaurant. It was one of those nights, you know, "How's rush going?" and then, he came out. I guess she'd been there maybe three nights. They're trying to figure out what to do and she said, "I was seen by the groundskeeper." He said, "I told you not to do that," and, from what he said, he grabbed her and started shaking her, and so on, and killed her. He threw her in the back of the car, backseat of the car. She had on a nightgown and, at that time, two red slippers she had on. So, he then drove up to the fraternity house, Delts, naturally, and they were having their rush stuff. They were [Dr. Gardner imitates partying], and so on. He goes in, walks right through this, walks down into the basement and pulled a poker from the furnace, comes back up, throws the poker in the car, drives to Sandusky, Ohio, which is clear up by Lake Erie, throws her out in the stubble of a cornfield and defaces her with the poker, strips her, but, you know, they say gangsters, criminals, always take something and always leave something behind. ... He left one of the red slippers. He forgot to get one of the red slippers, which was under her body. So, the police found the body and, just like in CSI on television, took it and traced it back to White Plains, New York, traced it back because only a very few of this particular slipper had been sold, traced the receipt back to this woman, Cynthia Pfeil, and so, they arrested him. But, they couldn't prove whether she was dead from the strangulation, which would be second-degree, the incident of strangling her, or whether the poker strokes killed her. They couldn't prove it one way or another. So, it was second-degree and he was sent to the Ohio State Penitentiary, where, as you might expect, he got a PhD in sociology and became a counselor by the time he finally got out. [laughter]

PC: This is why you were interested in the Lindbergh Case, right?

LG: Yes.

PC: I was thinking the same thing.

TF: It started all back there.

LG: Well, not only that, I mean, having a grandfather who saw Jesse James and the Younger Brothers and hearing about them, having a father who saw "Pretty Boy" Floyd's body over in East Liverpool, Ohio, after the FBI shot him up. I mean, you know, my house was filled with these stories.

SI: What kind of a scandal was that on campus?

LG: Oh, it was a big scandal, in the sense that Ohio Wesleyan took a lot of grief, upper-middle-class college, elite kids getting into trouble, all that stuff. You know, when I was a freshman, girls had to be in at eight o'clock at night. By the time they got to be seniors, they could stay out until ten-thirty. You'd get so many midnights a semester and one or two one AMs, for a formal or something, entirely different. Boys could do whatever they want, ... and live in town. Oh, no, girls could only live in the dorms. But, from what I hear, from some of my students from a year or so ago, some of the girls here are moving back to the dorms out of fear of the streets in New Brunswick.

SI: Were you in the ROTC with him? Were you in ROTC at all?

LG: How do you think I got my commission? [laughter] I didn't go to West Point, that's for sure. Yes, I mean, all of us were in ROTC, except those who were crippled and couldn't, or some other problem. Yes, Ohio Wesleyan ROTC was one of the two or three largest Air Force ROTC units in all of Ohio, one thousand boys in fraternities, one thousand students, one thousand boys in ROTC. This is Korean War [era], after all, and so, yes, he was in ROTC, and that's how I went through that and got my commission. They let me go through graduate school and, as soon as I was finished with my doctorate, they took me in.

SI: Why did you choose the Air Force ROTC over Army ROTC?

LG: Well, Ohio Wesleyan planned that. They were determined to have Air Force or Navy ROTC.

SI: Was Army ROTC even an option? No.

LG: They were determined to have Air Force ROTC. You're beginning to get my point, I think.

SI: Most places I have seen, they have the Army, and then, they have another option. What did you like about ROTC, or what did you not like about it?

LG: What did I like? [laughter] Well, you know, it was taught on, basically, a high school level, back then. I don't know what it's like now.

PC: It is taught on basically high school level. It really is.

LG: But, I sure as heck did not want to get drafted, and ROTC was the best way not to get drafted. Unlike Bill Clinton, I stayed the whole time in ROTC, but it was just what you did. The option was [to be drafted], ... although I went to my draft board. At one point, I was thinking about dropping out of ROTC and I went to my draft board and I said, "Will you draft me the second I drop out?" That was the threat, and they said, "No, we'd let you to finish. You'd get a 1-S deferment, at least through college," and then, something else happened. ... Then, you know, as I got closer to the end, when other people were saying, "Don't take the commission, you know, drop out, pay back whatever money they paid you." Then, I got to the notion, "By God, I was going to go through with it and I had come this far with it and I was going to go through with it." So, I did, took my commission, and then, they put me into public relations. My first job in the Air Force was sending pictures of missiles back to the little boys and girls who wrote "Dear Missile Man USA," which all wound up at what is now Cape Kennedy, or have they changed it back to Canaveral?

PC: I thought they changed it back.

LG: Changed it back?

PC: The town, at least, has gone back. The community's gone back. I'm not sure about the base itself.

LG: Patrick Air Force Base, maybe ... Kennedy Space Center, maybe that was it, but it was Cape Kennedy there for awhile and Cape Canaveral. ... They didn't know what to do with a PhD in history, so, they said, "All right, we'll put you in public relations," and so, I gave speeches about the testing and so on. It's amazing how quickly you can pick up that much knowledge and that's enough to go out and talk to Rotary or Kiwanis or something, make jokes about the base and so on, about the number of copperheads and rattlesnakes caught [on] any one day out there; God, what a miserable place. I do not like the State of Florida, [laughter] but Canaveral was the worst part of the State of Florida, I think, and I just don't like the humidity. ... I was there for a year-and-a-half, and then, I petitioned to get out, because I had gotten an offer from the University of Iowa, to go to the University of Iowa. ... There's a regulation, in Air Force regulations, "If you're not being utilized properly;" there's a military word, instead of using "used," "utilized," instead of saying "loading" or "off loading," or, "This is structured to be this way," you know, making nouns into verbs. ... I applied and, unfortunately, at the same time, Drew Pearson wrote a column on how the Air Force had allowed out a man on the same grounds who went to back to raising racehorses in Virginia, and so, they weren't going to let anybody out after that. Oh, I'd have gone to Iowa and probably still be out in Iowa City, because I love the Big Ten, but the other factor that happened in there was, I was investigated by the OSI [Office of Special Investigations]. Several of my graduate student colleagues had started a journal called Studies on the Left. We'd all come under the influence of a man named William Appleman Williams, for whom there'll be a huge conference ... next year here, next spring, yes, and he's contributing money to it.

PC: Yes.

TF: You are speaking, I hope.

LG: Yes. It's going to be a great conference; more on that later. So, I was in and I had been switched from public relations to intelligence. They said, "Maybe we can use you better," intelligence along the Atlantic Missile Range, where they tested missiles. So, I'm reading these top secret documents about dangerous uprisings on Grand Turk or some other place, and then, the OSI, Office of Special Investigations, called me up and called me down. ... It was just like you'd imagine, dark room, light shining in your face, secretary over here, taking notes, sitting essentially where she is, except this secretary had been in the hospital with my wife for a brief stay. ... They'd gotten to be friends, Erica, and it just drove them crazy. They would address me as, "Lieutenant Gardner," and she would always say, "I didn't hear that, Dr. Gardner," and that just froze them. They didn't know how to deal with that, and so, ... they couldn't find enough to kick me out of the Air Force, so, they took me out of intelligence. It was kind of a silly investigation. I mean, all it was was a graduate student journal. They would ask me questions like, "Did you know X?" "Yes." "Did you know he was a member of the Communist Party?" and I said, "No, I never asked him," and there were a whole bunch of divergent opinions on the editorial board of this journal. Now, whoever brought that to their attention, I have no idea, how it got to their attention ... down in the Air Force. It might have been one of the other lieutenants I was working with, because he had been in graduate school and we talked about graduate school a little bit, I don't know. ... Then, when I applied to get out and was turned down, they sent me to San Antonio to teach in Officer Candidate School.

SI: We covered that in the first interview. If we could just talk a little bit about your time at Wisconsin again, could you tell us about the influence of William Appleman Williams?

LG: He came [the] second year I was there and Fred Harrington, who was moving out of the History Department, into administration, became the president of University of Wisconsin, wanted to bring back one of his students to teach diplomatic history and he picked Williams, and Fred had never been a great publisher. He had always been a kind of administration-oriented person, from the beginning. That seems to be an endemic sickness with historians, to go into administration, waste their time. ... He had gone into this, more and more, and he brought Williams back and he said to three of us, "Now, I'm leaving, but I'll finish the three of you, if you want," said this to Walt LaFeber, Tom McCormick and myself. ... I was having a hard time getting to see him, ever, and so, I said, "Well, I'll finish with Bill Williams," but I've always felt as much his student as Williams, but Williams electrified that place, absolutely electrified. The only thing I can compare it to is Barack Obama's [effect], the devotion that he gets from people. ... He wasn't didactic, he didn't shout, he didn't do anything like that. He was just this Navy officer trained, engineering, architect background, structured arguments, beautifully structured. We were his TAs, Walt LaFeber and myself, first year he came. Here's a class of about 250 students. We're sitting in the back, first time we've heard any of this, and he would say, "Now, there are three factors here." He would get through factor one, subheading A, subheading B, subheading C, then, he would get to factor two, maybe subheading A and B, but never get to three. Students would come up and say, "What's the third? What's the third thing?" because you know how students are, it might be on a test, and we'd say, "I have no idea. We have no idea what the third factor is." ... We were so entranced that we got together and we said, "We have to have him to dinner, he and his wife, and just figure out what's going on in his head." When he came, the only book he'd published of significance was American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947, and Walt LeFeber had a copy of it and he said, "Look here, you know, ... wow, this is dramatic stuff, anti-George Kennan," who was kind of our hero, I mean, just incredible. So, we had him to dinner, and didn't make our wives happy, because they just sort of sat over there by themselves and talked, and we're just sitting around Williams, you know, just learning this stuff. It was just incredible, just incredible, and so, his influence was immediate and made an impact on Wisconsin, down to today. That book, Tragedy of American Diplomacy, still sells two thousand copies a year, fifty years later. This is the fiftieth anniversary of it. That's the cause for this conference next spring. Two thousand copies a year, ... I don't know how many history books sell two thousand copies a year, after fifty years. So, his influence was just incredible. Students started coming to Wisconsin, until he got fed up. He had so much a heavy load, ... and, also, his marriage was breaking up. He wanted to go back to the Oregon coastline, set up his telescopes, look out at sea, like something out of Dickens, and his writing, I think, deteriorated. Do you think his last books are very good?

PC: No, but it is hard to follow Tragedy.

LG: Tragedy is, you know, that and Contours, [The Contours of American History], and I like Roots of the American Empire. Other people don't like it so well, but I like it. Those are his big three. Those are the three most important books he did, plus he had some others. Yes, if you were to say, today, who was the most important figure in American diplomatic history in the last fifty years, if they didn't say William Appleman Williams, I'd be shocked. His biggest disciple right now is, in fact, not a Williams student, but an ex-military guy named Andrew Bacevich, which is sort of interesting.

SI: What about the journal, Studies on the Left?

LG: I was one of the original editors. It was my title. It was serious Left scholarship through three or four issues, and then, like all things in the 1960s, these people without an ideology, just simplemindedness, got hold of it and tried to turn it into a political action journal and it just absolutely deteriorated, but the first two or three issues were pretty good. I mean, what we were saying was, "We're not identified with any political party, ... but, you know, what we want to do is to present scholarship from a Left perspective," and then, it just got simply tied up with all the bad things ... that happened in the late 1960s.

SI: Do you remember anything about anything you wrote for the journal?

LG: I wrote only one article, "From New Deal to New Frontiers," in the first issue.

TF: When did you decide to concentrate on diplomatic history? Was it Williams' influence or was that predetermined?

LG: What was the ...

TF: When you went to Wisconsin, were you going there with the idea of studying American diplomatic history?

LG: ... I was torn between studying diplomatic and intellectual history, Merle Curti and Fred Harrington, between one of those two. ... For a time, I thought about switching to Curti, and then, Williams came and this was such a new world. I mean, you have to understand that the dominant textbook in diplomatic history, at that time, was Thomas Bailey's A Diplomatic History of [the] American People and, while it was beautifully written and helped to persuade me to go into diplomatic history, it portrayed American foreign policy as being totally responsive to outside influences, or perhaps, something he liked to talk about, public opinion. ... So, when Williams came in and started talking about interests and markets and all those kind of things, it sort of jibed, in a strange sort of way, with what I was saying about earlier, with my father's correspondence about the marketplace and the individual producer in the marketplace and what happens to the individual producer in the marketplace. So, it did sort of jibe with that. Of course, it influenced all of our ... first three books, Tom's book, China Market: [America's Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901], Walt's book, The New American Empire, [The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898], and my book, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy. Now, isn't that an exciting title? The original title for that book was American Foreign Policy in a Closed World. Why did I change it, you might wonder? I changed it because I did not want, at that early stage in my career, to be damned for presenting an economic interpretation of foreign policy. I wanted to save that back, so-to-speak. So, if I say it's only the economic aspects of New Deal diplomacy, what I'm saying is, "Oh, this is just part," ... but the original title was much better, American Foreign Policy in a Closed World. It didn't matter. [laughter] It was still damned, as an economic interpretation.

SI: When you were an undergraduate, or even in your graduate years, did you get involved in any outside political movements, anything like that?

LG: No, nor have I ever been. "I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist [Party]." [laughter] No, no, I never did. I mean, ... after all, [at the] 1968 teach-in here, I announced I was voting for Richard Nixon, yes.

TF: At the teach-in.

PC: I did. I'm having a real dilemma this year. I mean, I have announced I will not vote for Hillary Clinton. My wife is about to beat me over the head, if I don't vote, but I despise that branch, not Hillary, but that branch of the Democratic Party.

SI: I just have one more question before we jump back into Rutgers. In everything I have seen, you were really repulsed by your time at Lake Forest. I was wondering if you could talk more about that.

LG: Did you ever see the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

SI: You made that allusion last time. I was curious if you could explain a bit more.

LG: It must have been written about Lake Forest College. [laughter] When I went to graduate school, I thought I wanted to be a "Mr. Chips" and come back and teach at some small school and have students love me and all that kind of crap, and so, that's where I went my first year. I didn't want to go there, but it was a job that was open and my wife had just given birth a couple of months beforehand, our first daughter. ... It's either that or starve to death, because I had already gotten a year off from the Air Force to finish my dissertation. ... So, Lake Forest College, there, the faculty seemed almost dedicated to the proposition that, "Thou shalt not publish," and we'd have people get up at a faculty meeting and say, "I did my worst teaching when I was finishing my PhD," and so on. I just sort of shuddered at all this and the closeness of it, the fact that everybody seemed to know your business, in the entire community, or want to know your business. Now, the setting of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is exactly that and the couple, ... the older couple, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, George and Martha, entertain a young assistant professor and his wife. ... The wife of the older guy tries to seduce the young assistant professor and the old guy is telling the young assistant professor about his exploits as a college wrestler, how good he was, and there's one line in there that's just absolutely fantastic. It was left out of the movie, but it was in the play and we saw it in New York, and that was, Martha, his wife, is the daughter of the college president and always hoped that George would prove himself, but he hadn't, but, during World War II, because all of the men were drafted, all the other men in the history department, he moved up to associate professor and his hope was he would get to be a full professor and more and that some of these guys would get killed in the war, ... but he said, you know, "You didn't get killed writing OSS histories in Washington." That was left out of the movie, because it was too much, too good, actually, too accurate, and so, it was that kind of thing. ... I witnessed the guy who had hired me challenge a young associate, or assistant, English professor to a fight, he had been a wrestling thing and the young guy had been a boxer, ... after they'd had some drinks and so on. I just thought, "I can't stand [this]. This is claustrophobic, this is claustrophobic." I mean, their library had, probably, not as many volumes as my personal library, anymore; ... that's an exaggeration. They did have a lot more than that, but, in the morning, on the Chicago & North Western Railroad, all the businessmen went down to [Chicago] ... and exiting and getting into the cars that had brought the businessmen ... were all the maids who came out to work in the fancy houses in Lake Forest, and, at night, the process would be reversed. The chauffeurs would bring the cars up, the maids would get out, the businessmen would get in and that was the kind of place Lake Forest was, the exact opposite of Delaware, Ohio. This was a town strictly [for the] rich, except for the very poor, and so, I couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand it. Fortunately, here at Rutgers, I had met one of Bill Williams's friends, Warren Susman, and we had gotten together. He was teaching at Northwestern for a time, and then, he came to Rutgers and we'd kept in communication. So, I was getting out of the Air Force in '63. I was desperate, absolutely desperate, not to go back to Lake Forest and Susman said, "Well, they're having one of these periodic buyouts here," and so, the guy who taught diplomatic history here, was a very nice gentleman, was retiring early, which meant that, in '63, this job would come open. I applied for it, I interviewed at the American Historical Association in Chicago, and I got the job. Dick McCormick "the Elder," [Richard P. McCormick], was on the search committee, Henry Winkler and Peter Charanis. They were the three people who hired me. Charanis, I remember, I went home and told my wife, "I've met Bela Lugosi." I mean, Charanis had a wonderful accent that sounded, to me, a lot like Bela Lugosi, ... but he liked me because I was studying Russian at that time. Languages are very important. Of course, I dropped it as soon as I got out of the Air Force, because there wasn't any Russian tutor around that I could work with, and Dick McCormick, with whom I became very close over the years.

[TAPE PAUSED]

SI: I guess we want to get into your time at Rutgers. I know the students have more questions about the teach-ins.

LG: ... What do you want to know about the teach-in?

RR: In my research on the teach-ins, I saw that there were three teach-ins, actually, one in the spring of 1965 and two in the fall of 1965. Can you elaborate more on the second and third teach-ins?

LG: Nope, I can't. I don't remember them. I do not. I remember, but they're all mushed together. I remember the one in '65, I remember the one in '68 and I remember the stuff in '70, but those others, I don't; I just honestly don't. Now, part of the problem was that I wasn't here in the fall of '65. I had a year off and was down in Washington in the fall of '65-'66, so, I couldn't have been there, but, I remember, Genovese said something else at one of these.

RR: The second teach-in was by the (CFS?), I think. It was basically off the remarks from the first teach-in, that, "I am a Marxist and I'm for the Viet Cong victory."

LG: Yes, I mean, that, I can't help you with. I wish I could; I can't. I know that when I came back, and this will be of some help, ... Gene had become the big issue in the '65 gubernatorial campaign, but, then, in '66, Gene was unhappy with the History Department, didn't feel it was supporting him enough. ... The History Department was still up in Bishop House and Gene and Don Weinstein got in an argument and Don Weinstein said, "Oh, Gene, get down off that cross," which was hitting on Gene's former Catholicism, which he's now resumed, very much. He's gone completely to the Right, goes to Mass a couple of times a day, that sort of thing, and so, I said, "Why do you go to Mass so often?" "Oh, I have a lot to be forgiven for," for all the terrible things he did. You would think he was a bomb thrower.

PC: Lloyd, what do you think the impact of that first teach-in was on the student population here? How did you gauge it?

LG: Oh, I think it was a very positive impact. I think it was a very positive impact. All you have to do is read the Targum. You read the Targum for those things and it was a very, very serious effort and I think it brought faculty and students together in a very powerful way for a time. I think, ... by 1970, when Nixon went into Cambodia, nihilism took over, I think, just a sort of feeling. "We have spoken truth to power for five years and it's made no difference," and that's when you had a lot of stealing books from the library, just general anti-social behavior, which, I think, stemmed from this, from the disappointment afterwards. In other words, what I'm saying is, in a sense, the teach-in raised what you might call, in Kennedy-esque terms, a "revolution of rising expectations," and then, they just didn't happen.

PC: But, in the immediate aftermath of the teach-in, did those students carry their interest back into the classroom? Did you get into different types of discussions?

LG: Well, I always had great students. I mean, I've asked students in my classes last year and so on, last semester, "Why aren't they more engaged?" and they say, "Because all that seems to be happening 'out there.'" ... There was an immediacy to what was happening, caused by the draft and so on. But, you know, we held a teach-in at the beginning of the war, the Iraq War, and Jim Livingston was the one who organized that and he had to have a little rock group play to get students out, and I thought, "Oh, God," you know, "why is that? Why is that the only way you can get people interested?" There's no draft and people are not immediately threatened. Maybe four dollar a gallon gas, no prospect of jobs after college, might change things a little bit. But, that's one of the most discouraging things about right now, but there was [that spirit then], ... from that spring of '65. You've got to remember, the Civil Rights Movement was going on then, too, and there was a lot of student activity and Huthmacher and Susman, I think Susman and Huthmacher both went down to Selma, and so, you had that kind of interest in participatory democracy, if you will.

TF: Lloyd, you said you came to Rutgers in 1963.

LG: Yes.

TF: Do you remember the Don Harris Case? We were talking about Civil Rights. Don Harris was a Rutgers College graduate, African-American, who was arrested in Americus, Georgia, for participating in voter registration activities.

LG: Vaguely, but I couldn't ...

TF: It probably coincided with your first arrival here. It was a pivotal event.

LG: Yes. I remember the name, but I can't remember.

EK: Did groups like SNCC and CORE have a big presence on campus at that time?

LG: Who?

EK: The Congress on Racial Equality and SNCC.

PC: Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, SNCC.

EK: Was that a big presence on campus?

LG: No, not that I know of. When you say big presence, I don't know how ...

PC: The one that would have been most likely was SDS, [Students for a Democratic Society], and I do not know whether it had a presence or not.

LG: They weren't very powerful, either. Sam Baily was their advisor.

PC: But, they were here.

LG: They were here. Sam was their advisor. Sam would come up to me and say, "You know, they're great at figuring out how to get something started. What they don't have is any exit agenda, you know, they don't have any way of getting out of the situation."

RR: They actually ran the third teach-in in the fall of 1965 and there were many protests and a lot of controversy. It just ended horribly.

SI: You mentioned in the last interview that you were the advisor to the student action committee?

LG: In 1970, not SDS; Action for Peace Committee, it was called.

SI: Did that start only in 1970 or had it started earlier?

LG: Started in '70, started with Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and, immediately after that, Old Queens was occupied. We later found out that the idea for occupation of Old Queens was, I may have said this last time, [generated by an] agent provocateur, yes, and, there, you have to talk to the mathematician, Terry ...

PC: Terry Butler.

LG: Terry Butler, who had learned about this because the guy had been in his class a little bit and this guy was part of undercover Army people. ... The idea was to stir up trouble, so that they would, A., identify who the protestors were, and, B., call in people to discredit them, you know, have to get State Police to get them out, that kind of thing. It was all planned, the whole thing was planned and they hoped that, you know, this would really set this campus off. It didn't, because the faculty, in a series of meetings, met the challenge by naming an Action for Peace Committee to plan something special here. ... I was chair of that, co-chair of that, with an undergraduate student, and we planned to have a big convocation on Sunday, over there in the College Avenue Gym, to which we would invite all the Senators and state members of the House of Representatives to come, and we were trying to demonstrate that you could do this peacefully, without tearing up a campus, without doing any other thing. Meanwhile, that put the Old Queens occupation in the shadow and they came, I suppose, that close to having a showdown between the students and, etc., in Old Queens, a gang of Hell's Angels, who were coming down from Newark, and State Police, and they evacuated, and they cleaned up before they evacuated, and this provocateur got out of the way. I mean, he saw he was losing influence and got out of the way. So, of course, the Kent State shooting happened right in the middle of that, and that set things even more [on edge] and we had our convocation and we had all these letters from state representatives, "Sunday is a day of worship, couldn't possibly make it up there," you know, especially from South Jersey, the northernmost of the Southern states, and the only people who came were "Pete" Williams, [US Senator] Harrison Williams, [Congressman] Frank Thompson and the representative from New Brunswick, who was a great, old Irishman, Pat something or other. ... He said there had been more mail about the Nixon invasion of Cambodia than anything in his experience since Pearl Harbor. That was pretty impressive. Well, these were three guys who had the most to lose, electorally, right here in New Brunswick and they came, which added to one's feeling of cynicism about the way politics, in this country, works and the idea of truth to power and so on. The place was packed, the gym was packed, the speeches they gave were wonderful. Now, was it any coincidence that two people who had opposed Nixon, like Frank Thompson and Pete Williams, were caught up in Abscam? I don't think so. I think they set out to get them and, unfortunately, they proved to be getable. I think they both served time, didn't they, Harrison Williams and Frank Thompson?

TF: Williams, definitely.

PC: Williams did. I do not know about Thompson.

LG: I think Thompson did, I mean, and Thompson was such a bright star in the House of Representatives, but that was a dramatic time, and then, I was the commencement speaker, too. They wanted me to be the commencement speaker, right here.

TF: In 1970?

LG: 1970, and so, I decided that my topic would be trying to explain today's college generation to all these parents, at graduation. They didn't have a really long commencement, never did, here at Rutgers. I think I had maybe ten minutes, something like that.

PC: Wow, ten minutes. [laughter]

LG: I don't know. I can't remember.

TF: We probably have the tape.

LG: It was in the stadium. I know it was in Rutgers Stadium and I spoke and, whether it reconciled the parents to what happened at college or not, I don't know. At least I wasn't shot, ... but that was the exciting time, in the sense, again, of feeling that could make a difference. Of course, the war didn't end for another five years.

SI: Was 1970 also the year that the University was shut down? Was that 1971 or 1972?

LG: For a time, for a short time. It wasn't shut down until the clear end of the year, I don't think.

TF: They may have suspended final exams.

LG: Yes.

SI: Do you remember that being controversial? What do you remember about that?

LG: Yes. I mean, that was kind of controversial. Somebody had written a letter to the editor of the Home News saying that, "All those professors just wanted time to cut their grass," and ... my wife read this to my daughters; I was staying down here on campus all night, sort of sleeping on the couch in the dean's office or something, I can't remember. ... My daughters decided to answer this and they wrote a letter to the Home News, "My daddy," da-da-da-da, and, a few days after this was over, the phone rang at home and I picked it up, "This Professor Gardner?" and I said, "Yes." "We know where your daughters are and we're going to take care of them." So, we escorted them to school for the rest of the year, didn't tell them about it for several years after.

PC: They were both in high school at that time.

LG: Grade school.

PC: Grade school, really?

LG: That's thirty-eight years ago. [laughter]

PC: I know, I know, Lloyd.

LG: Thirty-eight years ago, Paul. I have a grandson entering college.

PC: I know this, I know, and I had Becky as a student, long after I got here.

LG: I know, right. ...

[TAPE PAUSED]

EK: You mentioned the Warren Susman Report last time, in the previous interview.

LG: Yes.

EK: It seems as though it was a really big development at that time; many students were discussing it in the Targum. I just want to get your feeling. What do you think the general faculty or student opinion of the report was?

LG: Well, I worked with Warren on a zillion things, both reports for [the] History Department [and elsewhere]. I did not work with him on this at all. We had a great dean, Arnold Grobman, one of the greatest deans, I think, we've had here, along with Dick Foley, and so, Arnold commissioned this report on just simply restructuring an undergraduate degree at a college like Rutgers. So, Warren was given a year off to do this and this is one of the few times when Warren actually met his deadlines. ... Some of the changes were implemented. Now, how many of them? I couldn't say. Now, my problem has always been that structures, any kind of structures, you know, I don't know how carefully people can adhere to them, how close they can come to the spirit of what Susman wanted. For example, one of the things he wanted was mini-courses. I think those were disasters. I just don't think seven weeks is time enough for you to get into a subject, seriously, but I taught one or two of them. ... You know, one was taught around here on, supposedly, what started out to be medieval science and what does it immediately [change to], the students, what did they re-title it? "Witchcraft." Then, we had a guy who liked to dress up in Western cowboy outfits and come in with a bottle of iced tea and talk about the old West, swig this stuff. I thought it was kind of juvenile, in many ways.

PC: Is he still here? [laughter]

LG: But, I don't know about the other stuff. I mean, what you would have to do is to look at the curriculum before the report, see how much of it was implemented, go through the faculty minutes and see how much of it was implemented. Warren was a genius and this was one of his interests, but I couldn't tell you how successful [it was].

EK: What did he see that was wrong with the University? What was he actually trying to change when he wrote that report?

LG: ... He was trying to get at the mechanization and, by that, I mean the rigidity of college life. He was trying to humanize it in another way and to make it more of an experience, a lifetime experience, that isn't just preparing you for your job. I think that's what he was trying to get at, and the size. Now, I don't know how you feel about the size around here, see, because I didn't go to Rutgers. I don't know whether you feel overwhelmed by that or not.

EK: You get used to it.

LG: I don't get that from students, that they [do]. Do you feel overwhelmed?

RR: Not really.

EK: It is like you are not used to anything else, so, it is what you are accustomed to.

LG: ... But, it takes a certain kind of student to come to Rutgers. It takes a student who is willing to do and act and go see people and do that. You can get lost in the mob here, very easily.

EK: No one looks out for you.

TF: You learn that very quickly.

LG: I ran into a couple of people, even at Ohio Wesleyan, my fiftieth anniversary class, I never knew they existed. I mean, you know, "Who is that?" "Oh, that's So-and-So." "Well, who's that?" ... So, even in a small college, it's possible for some people to get lost in the mob.

SI: In the last interview, you mentioned that, during your chairmanship of the history department, you wanted to implement certain curriculum and teaching changes and a new attitude towards teaching. Do you remember what changes you were going after or how you went about doing that?

LG: Throughout my career, I tried to hire people here in fields that hadn't been hired. I think there was an insularity about the History Department when I came in 1963 and, as a foreign policy scholar, I was concerned that we weren't covering Japan, we weren't covering Asia, we weren't covering the Middle East, and that sort of thing. So, as these new jobs, and we were hiring two or three people a year, came up, I pushed very hard for there to be positions in Japanese history and Asian history, and so on, and so forth, and that bore considerable fruit, I think. Michael Adas, I almost turned him off in the interview, although he was desperate for a job. He came to interview in Chicago and he knocked on my door just as the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Cowboys were kicking off and I said, "I'll see you in about three hours," you know, "I mean, I can't possibly talk history at this moment." [laughter] Michael likes to tell that story; he likes to pull it out and tell it. It's true. Then, there was another person that we got hired here.

[TAPE PAUSED]

SI: We are back on.

LG: Yes. In my chairmanship, my only concern was that one of the issues then was the way the European survey was taught, and the Europeans were arguing amongst themselves. So, I appointed a couple of guys to work together to straighten it out, and that was one of the main things that happened there. I also wanted to try to make the teaching hours as fair as possible, as I could, in that some people ... really were not extending themselves, I thought, very much. ... That's, again, a kind of situation where I just persuaded some people to do things a little differently, that's all. I didn't make any big changes, I didn't ... try to make any changes in the major or anything. Those were coming, I mean, those were coming without me and what was happening. I was just chair for three years.

SI: Tom brought up the Don Harris Case before, which I think Dr. McCormick's book marks as the first ...

TF: First sparks, yes.

SI: Yes, first spark of the Civil Rights Movement here at Rutgers. Do you remember anything else about Civil Rights here at Rutgers?

LG: Oh, yes. I remember the black strike and the way that Dick McCormick calmed that down, spoke to their issues, and we then had those programs put in place, the gateway programs and so on. I don't know the names of all of them, and the woman who was put in charge of that, who was at Dick's party?

PC: Eve Sachs.

LG: Eve Sachs, and, also, the Black Studies program and so on. ... Dick, I thought, handled that brilliantly. I thought he did.

SI: I think that was the year before the takeover of Old Queens.

LG: I think it was '68. I think it was '68, wasn't it?

SI: 1968 or 1969.

LG: '68, '69.

TF: Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in 1968; students in Newark took over Conklin Hall in 1969.

LG: That might have been it, '69.

SI: I was wondering if his response to that event influenced the way you responded to the takeover of Old Queens. It sounded like maybe you followed a similar template.

LG: Yes, I wouldn't say that Dick followed anything I did. Dick was sui generis. ... No, I mean, he handled it very well. He handled a lot of things very well, I thought. ... He didn't like administration. I mean, he did these things only because he was loyal to Rutgers, but, when he was department chair, I think he was a neophyte at the way some of the things went on here and, when people got outside offers, and so on, and so forth, I don't think he handled that as well as he could have, but ... this was early on in the game. One of our colleagues, it might have been Genovese, but ... I don't think it was Genovese, I think it was somebody else; oh, here was the issue. Phil Greven was hired at a higher salary than some of our sitting associate professors, and, when this was announced, I don't know how it was announced, can't remember, Dick was chair and a lot of us said, "What's going on here, you know? Why is this going on here?" and so, the noise got so boisterous that Dick set up a meeting for the History Department with Arnold Grobman and Grobman said, in effect, "Well, you have to go and get outside offers." I mean, he wasn't telling us in words that simple, but everyone who was at that meeting came away with the notion, if you wanted to get an advance in salary, outside of the regular circuit, and we were all underpaid, at that point, you had to get an outside offer. Well, you know, it's a lot easier for someone in my position, American foreign affairs, than someone in Latin American history to get an outside offer, but, you know, we went out and we got outside offers and we got them matched. ... I think Dick learned a lot from that and he knew how to deal with it a little better after that, but, you know, that was happening all over academia in the country at that time, the notion of outside offers and bargaining for people's services. It'd only really just begun then, I think, in earnest, because you don't hear much of that in the 1950s or '40s.

PC: Did you have to do that as chair, Lloyd? I mean, when you were chair, did people come to you with outside offers?

LG: I must have met a couple, yes, I must.

PC: But, it did not leave a lasting impression on you, so, it was not really troubling you.

LG: ... By that time, it was bureaucratic. It's what you did and it became more and more regularized as you went along. I mean, the whole thing, take the position, I don't know if anybody's talked to you about the position of Professor II. Did we talk about that?

SI: We talked a little bit about it last time, that it was created as a super professor rank.

LG: It was created, in part, because they had to pay scientists, or they had to pay people more than they were being paid at state colleges and they had no other way to do it except create a rank of Professor II. ... The rap on that was that these were the plums that Mason Gross, [sixteenth President of Rutgers University, 1959-1971], and Dick Schlatter were giving out to their favorites, so that while it was a rank that was nominated by the chairs for a time, then, it became more and more regularized down through the years, until, now, it's regularized and, in fact, even the chair is now regularized, aren't they, the recommendation to put somebody into a chair or not?

PC: I do not know.

LG: Does the department vote on that?

PC: I was elected.

LG: Yes.

PC: Nominally, the dean appoints me, but I am elected, yes.

LG: No, no, no.

PC: Oh, you mean title chairs? Okay, yes, there is a regular procedure that goes right up to the Board of Governors.

LG: See, all of this has been regularized, which is a good thing, I think, ... so that there was anxiety about that, and, of course, Grobman was worried about the unionization. Did we talk about that?

SI: No.

LG: Grobman was worried that unionization of the University was going to destroy collegial relations, but he saw it coming and he appointed a committee to study the impact of unionization on college life. Now, that report may be out there somewhere, I don't know. It probably is somewhere, but it was a very congenial committee and we worked very well and turned up, ... I think, some pretty good stuff. So, that might be out there somewhere. Do you have an archive of that stuff?

TF: Yes, we have both sides. It might be either in the AAUP records ...

LG: So, you would have Grobman's records, as dean?

TF: Yes, when he was Dean of Rutgers College, yes.

LG: Yes.

SI: You served on that committee.

LG: ... I must have, or I wouldn't know about it, would I? [laughter] It's not something that really stands out, anything I authored or anything, but I think I did.

SI: The AAUP must have been on campus before then.

LG: Oh, yes.

SI: Just from the little I know of the general history of the AAUP, it used to be more about academic freedom issues than bargaining.

LG: Well, academic freedom before bargaining. I mean, the bargaining is such an issue, the unionization of the faculty. Now, the AAUP has been, pretty traditionally, leery of merit pay, for the same reasons that people were leery of Schlatter and Gross passing out Professor II-ships and so on to their favorites. ... The unionization is what led to a lot of the regularization of all these procedures. Is that good or bad? I mean, I argue with some of my colleagues that there was going to be an opportunity for people to get better salaries without the AAUP, but I wouldn't bet my life on that. I wouldn't stand up before a firing squad and say that. So, if you were to ask me, on balance, has it been good, the AAUP? I would probably say yes, but I also know a lot of people who have been in the leadership of the AAUP that, it seems to me, are not concerned about quality very much. ...

TF: Did you talk about co-education?

LG: Oh, yes, he appointed a committee on that, too, Grobman. He was a pioneer. He was big for it. Of course, that made him persona non grata over at Douglass, ... but Arnold felt very strongly in favor of that.

SI: Did you have any opinion on that?

LG: Did I have any opinion on it? Oh, I was for it, but I was not on any committee.

SI: How did other members of the faculty or the student body feel?

LG: Oh, I think most people were in favor. Actually, you know, how big a shift was it, in terms of your actual teaching experience, because there were lots of Douglass women in your classes? ...

PC: That is an interesting question, because, for me, I came right at the point it was starting and it was an enormous shift. I remember seeing one woman in my first class I taught here, just literally one. By the fourth year I was here, the classes were thirty percent women and, soon after that, they were fifty. So, it really mattered.

LG: ... But, I think it was seamless, is I think the point I was trying to make, but I don't think there was any protests against it or anything like that.

PC: Oh, no.

LG: ... When I said, you know, they were already here, in a sense, ... you're right, there wouldn't be a lot of women in your classes, but there were always women in your classes.

PC: Yes, and you could teach over, occasionally, on the Douglass Campus, although you sort of had to be invited to do it, and then, you would get classes with women and some men in it, as opposed to classes with men and some women in it.

LG: Yes.

PC: I mean, I never taught at Douglass until after it no longer mattered, through, I guess, about 1980.

LG: Yes.

TF: I was wondering what your opinion was of the leadership of the University over the time you were here. I guess you would start with Mason Gross and his administration. You mentioned Dick Schlatter.

LG: Well, Mason Gross, of course, was the revered leader when I came, and I didn't find much to revere about him. I thought he was okay, I mean, don't get me wrong, ... and he did a lot, but, when [Edward J.] Bloustein, [seventeenth President of Rutgers University, 1971-1989], came, and then, that first report by the Middle States, that we should give up the idea of being a great university, I don't think Mason Gross had tried very hard to move us in the direction of being a great university. Now, I may be wrong there. I was not involved in Old Queens at that point to know. What I do know was that Ed Bloustein had a real agenda to carry the University forward. Does that mean that I trusted everything that Ed did? no, but I thought he had a real agenda to carry things forward. ... He may have been burning out at the end, before he died, his wife's brain tumor, and then, his own illness and so on, but, then, I was not the inner-inner circle with Ed. I was sort of the outer-inner circle, and so, I would see him, but not as often as the inner-inner circle, and I agreed almost entirely with everything he did when I was chairing the Committee on Standards and Priorities, thought that was a wonderful innovation.

TF: What was the mission of that group or the focus, the goal, of that committee?

LG: Well, it was formed right after that Middle States evaluation said Rutgers should give up the idea of becoming a great university, and Ed then hired Alec Pond and said, "We're not going to put up with this, and we're going to do something about it." ... He put Danny Gorenstein in charge of this committee, which had the title of Committee on Standards and Priorities, and then, later, it became Committee on Standards and Priorities and Development, so that its mandate kept getting larger and larger, and that was, we evaluated graduate departments and made recommendations on what departments to put resources into, and I thought there was more dispassionate talk and serious talk in that committee than any committee I've ever been on. Nobody was chauvinistic and so on; it was just a wonderful committee. The appointments were handled carefully and so on. I served as a member for three years, and then, I was chair of it for three years, and, of course, then, when [Francis L.] Lawrence, [eighteenth President of Rutgers University, 1990-2002], came, I was happy I was off it, because he pretty much sidetracked it. ... I knew we were in trouble when he got lost between Old Queens and Geology Hall, when he was supposed to meet us that first day, but that was eight years of waste, you know, that was eight years of spinning our wheels, that we could not afford at this university. So, I could tell you some stuff about the end of the Lawrence Administration, too.

TF: Were you part of the Faculty Alliance for Rutgers, John Gillis's group?

LG: Yes, well ...

TF: Were you part of that?

LG: There were a couple or three of those things and, yes, I was, tangentially, ... a part of that. I was also part of a group that Gene O'Hara summoned over at the Hyatt Hotel, toward the end of the Lawrence thing, where we gave him an earful. ... Then, one of the other members of the Board of Governors came up to me at a basketball game and said, "Well, one of the things that you want to happen has happened," which I could only interpret as that was the end of Fran Lawrence. So, then, we had an opportunity to start anew and we had two terrific candidates, Dick Foley and Dick McCormick, [Richard L. McCormick, nineteenth President of Rutgers University, 2002-Present].

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Reviewed by Shaun Illingworth 8/1/08

Reviewed by Sandra Stewart Holyoak 8/10/08

Reviewed by Lloyd Gardner 6/6/2015

Reviewed by Molly Graham 6/24/2015