Professor of American intellectual history, University of California, Berkeley, 1952-1980 : oral history transcript / 1999

University of California • Berkeley

Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

University History Series
Department of History at Berkeley

Henry F. May

PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, 1952-1980

With an Introduction by
David T. Bailey

Interviews Conducted by

Ann Lage

in 1998

Copyright <D 1999 by The Regents of the University of California

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a method of
collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a
narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-
informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the
historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for
continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected
manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.

************************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and Henry F. May
dated June 11, 1998. The manuscript is thereby made available for
research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including
the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the
University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may
be quoted for publication without the written permission of the
Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California,
Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with Henry F. May require that he be notified of the
request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Henry F. May, "Professor of American
Intellectual History, University of
California, Berkeley, 1952-1980," an oral
history conducted in 1998 by Ann Lage,
Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft
Library, University of California,
Berkeley, 1999.

Copy no.

Henry F. May, 1993,

Photo by Jane Scherr.

Cataloguing information

Henry F. May (b. 1915) Professor of History

Professor of American Intellectual History, University of California,
Berkeley, 1952-1980. 1999, xii, 218 pp.

Family, youth, and public school education in Berkeley; undergraduate years
at University of California, social life and radical politics on campus,
1933-1937; graduate study in American history at Harvard University, 1937-
1941: friendships, mentors, marriage, attitudes toward communism and the
war in Europe; teaching at Lawrence College; World War II service in the
Pacific as a Japanese language officer; professor at Scripps College, 1947-
1952, Salzburg Seminar; professor of history at Berkeley, 1952-1980: social
life of Berkeley faculty and community, faculty hiring and promotions;
observations and role during the 1960s student protest at Berkeley: the
Free Speech Movement, 1964, anti-war protests of 1960s- 1970s, Third World
strike, People's Park, impact on university teaching and society; research,
writing, and teaching on American intellectual life, study of religion,
family history; reflections on the craft of history.

Introduction by David T. Bailey, professor of history, Michigan State
University.

Interviewed 1998 by Ann Lage for the Department of History at
Berkeley series.

TABLE OF CONTENTS --Henry May

PREFACE i

INTRODUCTION by David T. Bailey iv

INTERVIEW HISTORY by Ann Lage ix

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION xii

I FAMILY, YOUTH, AND EDUCATION IN BERKELEY 1
Parents 2
Family Religion and Standard of Living 6
Connections to the UC Berkeley Campus Community 8
Grammar School Years 10
Family Trip to Europe 11
Junior High and High School 13
University of California, Berkeley, 1933-1937 17

Social Life and Extracurricular Activities 17

Academics 19

Sports and Campus Politics 21

Radical Politics at Cal 25

A Serious Girlfriend 29

Hiking Experiences 29

Leaving for Graduate School at Harvard University 30

Choice of History as an Undergraduate Major 32

II HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL, 1937-1941 33
Train Trip to Harvard 33
Difficult Adjustments 34
Dunster House 36
Engagement and Marriage to Jean 38
Mentors and Influential Professors 40
Dissertation 42
Ethnic Prejudices at Harvard 43
Evolution of Political Attitudes 44
First Faculty Position at Lawrence College, 1941-1942 49

III WORLD WAR II 52
Return to the Bay Area 52
Recruitment and Training as a Japanese Translator 53
Amphibious Group 12 and the Okinawa Operation 57
Bombing of Hiroshima and the Occupation of Japan 61

IV RETURN TO ACADEMIA AND POSTWAR ADJUSTMENTS 64
Return from Tour of Duty 64
Completion of Dissertation 65
Scripps College and Family Life in Claremont, California,

1947-1952 67

Publication and Recepti >n of First Book 71

Salzberg Seminar in American Studies, 1949 73

Visiting Faculty at Bowdoin College, 1950-1951 76

Move Away from Identification with Communism 77

Recruitment by UC Berkeley 79

V UC BERKELEY IN THE FIFTIES: HISTORY DEPARTMENT FACULTY AND

PUBLICATIONS 82

Adjustments to New Location and Standard of Living 82

Relationships with Faculty Members 84

Life in the Berkeley Community 85

Political and Religious Attitudes of History Faculty 86

Faculty Battles over Hiring and Promotions 89

Graduate and Undergraduate Students 95

History Conferences 96

More on Teaching and Faculty Battles 98

Writing and Publication of The End of American Innocence 100

Fulbright Fellowship in Belgium 105

Work on The Enlightenment in America 109

Department Chair, 1964-1966 112

Chancellor Edward Strong 113

Campus Political Scene in the Fifties 115

Throckmorton Manor 117

VI STUDENT PROTEST AT BERKELEY IN THE SIXTIES 119
Attitudes Toward the Student Movement 119
Precipitating Events of the Free Speech Movement, 1964 120
The May Resolutions 122
Meeting at the Greek Theatre 126
The Faculty Forum and Faculty Divisions over Student Protest 129
Attitudes of Key Administration Officials 132
Radicalization of the Student Movement 133
Attitudes Toward the Vietnam War and the Anti-War Movement 135
Graduate Students 139
Textbook with Charles Sellers 140
New Faculty Appointments 141
More on the Anti-War Movement 142
Filthy Speech Movement 143
The Muscatine Report on Educational Reform 144
Social Relationships in the History Department 147

VII BERKELEY IN THE LATE SIXTIES 149
Third World Strike 149
People's Park Incident 151
Vietnam University 154
Historical Assessment of the Student Movement 157
Impact of the Student Movement on Social Mores and Campus

Culture 159

Impact of the Student Movement on Self and Other Faculty 162

Faculty Departures from the History Department 165

Generational Politics 167

The Margaret Byrne Chair and Outside Offers 169

VIII BERKELEY IN THE SEVENTIES, PUBLICATIONS, AND RETIREMENT 172

Pitt Professor, Cambridge University 172

Impact of Affirmative Action on Faculty Appointments 174

Completion and Reception of The Enlightenment in America 176

Religious Studies Program at Berkeley 179

First Soviet-American Historians Colloquium, 1972 180

Decision to Retire in 1980 183

Retirement Years: Academic Symposia and Travels Abroad 185

Genesis and Reception of Coming to Terms 187

Publication of Collected Essays 188

Friendships, and Avocation as a Painter 189

Reflections on the Craft of History 192

TAPE GUIDE 196

APPENDIX

December 4, 1964 press conference statement 197

University History Oral History Series List 200

INDEX 212

PREFACE TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BERKELEY ORAL HISTORY SERIES

The Department of History at Berkeley oral history series grew out
of Gene Brucker's (Professor of History, 1954-1991) 1995 Faculty
Research Lecture on "History at Berkeley." In developing his lecture on
the transformations in the UC Berkeley Department of History in the
latter half of the twentieth century, Brucker, whose tenure as professor
of history from 1954 to 1991 spanned most of this period, realized how
much of the story was undocumented.

Discussion with Carroll Brentano (M.A. History, 1951, Ph.D.
History, 1967), coordinator of the University History Project at the
Center for Studies in Higher Education, history department faculty wife,
and a former graduate student in history, reinforced his perception that
a great deal of the history of the University and its academic culture
was not preserved for future generations. The Department of History,
where one might expect to find an abiding interest in preserving a
historical record, had discarded years of departmental files, and only a
fraction of history faculty members had placed their personal papers in
the Bancroft Library.1

Moreover, many of the most interesting aspects of the history—the
life experiences, cultural context, and personal perceptions—were only
infrequently committed to paper.2 They existed for the most part in the
memories of the participants.

Carroll Brentano knew of the longtime work of the Regional Oral
History Office (ROHO) in recording and preserving the memories of
participants in the history of California and the West and the special
interest of ROHO in the history of the University. She and Gene Brucker
then undertook to involve Ann Lage, a ROHO interviewer/editor who had
conducted a number of oral histories in the University History Series
and was herself a product of Berkeley's history department (B.A. 1963,
M.A. 1965). In the course of a series of mutually enjoyable luncheon

'The Bancroft Library holds papers from history professors Walton
Bean, Woodbridge Bingham, Herbert Bolton, Woodrow Borah, George
Guttridge, John Hicks, Joseph Levenson, Henry May, William Alfred
Morris, Frederic Paxson, Herbert Priestley, Engel Sluiter, Raymond
Sontag.

2Two published memoirs recall the Berkeley history department: John
D. Hicks, My Life with History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1968) recalls his years as professor and dean, 1942-1957; Henry F. May
reflects on his years as an undergraduate at Berkeley in the thirties in
Coming to Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

ii

meetings, the project to document the history of the Department of
History at Berkeley evolved.

In initial discussions about the parameters of the project, during
which the varied and interesting lives of the history faculty were
considered, a crucial decision was made. Rather than conduct a larger
set of short oral histories focussed on topics limited to departmental
history, we determined to work with selected members of the department
to conduct more lengthy biographical memoirs. We would record relevant
personal background- -family, education, career choices, marriage and
children, travel and avocations; discuss other institutional
affiliations; explore the process of creating their historical works;
obtain reflections on their retirement years. A central topic for each
would be, of course, the Department of History at Berkeley—its
governance, the informal and formal relationships among colleagues, the
connections with the broader campus, and curriculum and teaching at both
the graduate and undergraduate level.

Using the Brucker lecture as a point of departure, it was decided
to begin to document the group of professors who came to the department
in the immediate postwar years, the 1950s, and the early 1960s. Now
retired, the younger ones somewhat prematurely because of a university
retirement incentive offer in the early nineties, this group was the one
whose distinguished teaching and publications initially earned the
Department of History its high national rating. They made the crucial
hiring and promotion decisions that cemented the department's strength
and expanded and adapted the curriculum to meet new academic interests.

At the same time, they participated in campus governing bodies as
the university dealt with central social, political, and cultural issues
of our times, including challenges to civil liberties and academic
freedom, the response to tumultous student protests over free speech,
civil rights and the Vietnam War, and the demands for equality of
opportunity for women and minorities. And they benefitted from the
postwar years of demographic and economic growth in California
accompanied for the most part through the 1980s with expanding budgets
for higher education. Clearly, comprehensive oral histories discussing
the lives and work of this group of professors would produce narratives
of interest to researchers studying the developments in the discipline
of history, higher education in the modern research university, and
postwar California, as well as the institutional history of the
University of California.

Carroll Brentano and Gene Brucker committed themselves to
facilitate the funding of the oral history project, as well as to enlist
the interest of potential memoirists in participating in the process.
Many members of the department responded with interest, joined the
periodic lunch confabs, offered advice in planning, and helped find
funding to support the project. In the spring of 1996, the interest 01

ill

the department in its own history led to an afternoon symposium,
organized by Brentano and Professor of History Sheldon Rothblatt and
titled "Play It Again, Sam." There, Gene Brucker restaged his Faculty
Research Lecture. Professor Henry F. May responded with his own
perceptions of events, followed by comments on the Brucker and May
theses from other history faculty, all videotaped for posterity and the
Bancroft Library.1

Meanwhile, the oral history project got underway with interviews
with Delmer Brown, professor of Japanese history; Nicholas Riasanovsky,
Russian and European intellectual history; and Kenneth Stampp, American
history. A previously conducted oral history with Woodrow Borah, Latin
American history, was uncovered and placed in The Bancroft Library. An
oral history with Carl Schorske, European intellectual history, is in
process at the time of this writing, and more are in the works. The
selection of memoirists for the project is determined not only by the
high regard in which they are held by their colleagues, because that
would surely overwhelm us with candidates, but also by their willingness
to commit the substantial amount of time and thought to the oral history
process. Age, availability of funding, and some attention to a balance
in historical specialties also play a role in the selection order.

The enthusiastic response of early readers has reaffirmed for the
organizers of this project that departmental histories and personal
memoirs are essential to the unraveling of some knotty puzzles: What
kind of a place is this University of California, Berkeley, to which we
have committed much of our lives? What is this academic culture in
which we are enmeshed? And what is this enterprise History, in which we
all engage? As one of the project instigators reflected, "Knowing what
was is essential; and as historians we know the value of sources, even
if they are ourselves." The beginnings are here in these oral
histories.

Carroll Brentano, Coordinator

University History Project

Center for Studies in Higher Education

Gene Brucker

Shepard Professor of History Emeritus

Ann Lage, Principal Editor
Regional Oral History Office

'The Brucker lecture and May response, with an afterword by David
Hollinger, are published in History at Berkeley: A Dialog in Three Parts
(Chapters in the History of the University of California, Number Seven),
Carroll Brentano and Sheldon Rothblatt, editors [Center for Studies in
Higher Education and Institute of Governmental Studies, University of
California, Berkeley, 1998].

iv

INTRODUCTION by David T. Bailey

I went to Berkeley because of a book. One of my many advisors had
told me that the best way to decide on graduate school is to read the
books of the people you would want to direct your dissertation. So I
went through a month of most demanding recreational reading, until I hit
upon a peculiarly titled book, by then ten years old: End of American
Innocence . It begins with a wonderful, evocative and, to me, utterly
mysterious sentence: "Everybody knows that at some point in the
twentieth century America went through a cultural revolution." Only a
few pages in and I knew I would have no choice; if Berkeley would have
me, I must learn from this man, Henry May.

We all have images of authors, pictures in our heads of what they
must look like. I remember one student, coming to work with Ken Stampp,
expressing horror that the great author of The Peculiar Institution was
not black! The Henry May I imagined, from reading everything of his I
could find, seemed to me a figure who could have sat comfortably across
the dining table from Emerson, a man who might look the role of a sage.
I am startled to remember, a quarter of a century later, that when I met
him, (callow, twenty-two-year-old kid from Toronto and Buffalo that I
was) he was precisely what I expected. A man about six feet tall, but
seemingly always leaning forward to look more intensely at you, May's
eyes are often the first thing which hit you. They are intense, probing
eyes, just a bit the eyes of a wizard, eyes which expect a great deal of
the world and look at it (and at you) to find out whatever really
matters. They are made all the more prominent by a forehead which, my
older daughter once remarked, just goes on and on.

Throughout the post-World War II decades, young men and women
sought out sages, only to be deeply disappointed and alienated when
their Merlins turned out not quite as wise as advertised. Berkeley,
especially in the wake of the Free Speech Movement, had become guru-
central, even in a state obsessed with the hunt for secret wisdom. Yet
however Central Casting might have judged him, May resisted the
sometimes desperate need of young people to tell him what to think.
Indeed, he was never, in any conventional sense, a great teacher, what
he refers to derisively as "the wind machine." His lectures struck me
at the time as sometimes unnecessarily difficult, asking such intense
concentration from the students that one told me his "brain always hurt
at the end of class." For May, lectures served as opportunities to make
the complicated connections necessary to see how ideas penetrated the
American society, and if this required a casual mention of the Halevy
thesis, a passing reference to Rousseau, or a quick precis of an Edwards
sermon, the better students always had the sense to ask him to slow
down. He made an implicit covenant with students: work hard, think
carefully, and the difficult business of the nature of American

intellectual development will come to you, both directly as subject
matter and indirectly as a way of thinking. Others at Berkeley happily
fed the students easy lessons of what would ultimately prove to be
limited wisdom, but perhaps the greatest liberation came from being
challenged to push aside current fashions and find deeper meaning
through investigations of more serious stuff. Maybe Henry May was a bit
of a wizard after all, responding to a puzzled student's awkwardly
phrased questions by rubbing his forehead in a circular motion and
saying, "Mr. Jones, that's a very complicated matter."

While Berkeley certainly had a well-deserved reputation for its
commitment to the postwar movement for personal and political
liberation, the main campus of the increasingly enormous University of
California delighted in describing itself as the greatest university in
the world, and Clark Kerr and other leaders had good reason to crow.
From Lawrence's cyclotron up in the hills, and all it had meant to the
transformation of the twentieth century, to department after department
ranked first or second in the nation, Berkeley was, in Margot Adler's
lovely phrase, "like entering a fantasy of what the agora might have
been in ancient Athens." The origin and the nature of this profound
achievement are not my subject, but to understand Henry May you must
understand a bit about the transformation of this place. I came to
Berkeley from Buffalo, and, with no money to pay for the trip, I drove
the 2700 miles in three and a half days. Although I had briefly lived
in Long Beach as a small child, I learned from this trip how terribly
far California is from the rest of the country, how isolated one could
feel from family, friends, and, increasingly as I came to understand,
professional contacts. This relative isolation had produced, for its
first half -century, a nice, second-tier regional campus, sometimes with
excellent individual faculty, and occasionally able to attract an off
beat but extraordinary mind, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although
born in Denver, May came as a young child to this Berkeley, growing up
in its shadow, attending University High in Oakland and ultimately
having a bucolic undergraduate experience in the thirties at Cal. As he
has described in several places, he went east, to Harvard, to become the
intellectual and the historian who would later be called back, in 1952,
to Cal, where he would spend the rest of his career.

When it hired May, the Berkeley Department of History had begun,
with most of the departments on campus, one of the most remarkable
transformations in the history of higher education. The causes of that
transformation are complex and still need greater research, but in the
history department, the move to become a first-rate operation was led by
Carl Bridenbaugh, Kenneth Stampp, and a few others. May
enthusiastically joined the project of finding the brightest minds
(although restricted almost exclusively to young men in the 1950s) and
offering them the chance to build a rich intellectual community. By
disposition, May violated one of Tocqueville' s standards of Americanism:
he was never much of a joiner. However, creating a great department,

vi

and thriving on the interactions among Joe Levenson, Thomas Kuhn,
William Bouwsma, Kenneth Stampp, and many others, gave May a forum in
which his enormously fertile mind could, at least from time to time, be
at play. As these young men matured into the leading scholars in their
fields, graduate students swarmed to the department, enhancing both the
richness and depth of May's community. There is a perhaps apocryphal
story that two Columbia history professors had their first conversation
when they ran into one another in Europe, although they had had offices
across the hall from one another for over a decade. This anti-collegial
mode is commonplace among historians, who are used to isolation in their
work. Berkeley provided May with the opposite: an environment in which
interaction came to be valued, and in which May's meditations on
modernism and its American fate could cross-fertilize with Levenson' s on
Confucianism and its modern fate, in which his graduate seminars could
probe ideas rather than simply present them. Indeed, he increasingly
preferred seminars on subjects he was trying to understand, rather than
on materials he had already figured out.

Of course, truly vital communities include conflict with
creativity. The "old guard," including some of the professors May had
learned from as an undergraduate, gradually lost power and prestige as
May and the young cadre transformed the place, and for these suddenly
obsolete faculty, this had the taste of a bitter pill. Disputes arising
from personal matters leached into the department as well; so did
debates over whether so-and-so quite measured up for tenure. But for
May, the greatest challenge came from the earthquake in the fall of
1964. In the Free Speech Movement, students demanded that they too
should have the rights of intellectual community. May struggled to
understand Savio and his movement, briefly took a key role in the drama,
and ultimately viewed the events with a mixture of hurt, outrage, and
loss. He thought about these events for the subsequent thirty-five
years, and this oral history serves, in many ways, as the chance finally
to make sense of these complicated issues of community and conflict.

May's standing as a member of this vital community stemmed from
his abilities as a scholar. He had always wanted to be a writer, and if
not for the intervention of war, and marriage, and all the sense of
responsibility that entailed, perhaps he would have gone to New York to
try his hand at the writer's game. Yet for May, writing has never been
easy. He has taken a moral stance that what he writes has to be worth
something. I once praised his brief essay on the 1920s, and he looked
at me as if I had gone crazy; "That's the only hack work I ever did," he
said, with some outrage in his voice. His output is not enormous: one
book based on his dissertation, two big books on important subjects,
dozens of shorter pieces, a memoir, and a textbook. Each piece took a
great deal out of him: sweat, sleepless nights, agony over structure,
worry over whether it would be original enough, clear enough, strong
enough. And each piece (including that essay on the twenties) made a
iif "erence. His writings never simply contributed to the conversation:

vii

one more county study, one more biography of a governor. Instead, there
is, even in a minor piece such as the introduction to the reprinting of
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Old Town Folks, a sense of discovery, a window
thrown open to a complicated and interesting new world.

In the corpus of May's writing lurks an even more surprising
element: a consistent vision of what matters in life. Henry May's view
of life stems from a complicated stew of influences: his elderly father,
his English mother, his childhood reading in Victorian fiction, Karl
Marx, Reinhold Niebuhr, Perry Miller, William James, the Book of Common
Prayer, Henry James, Henry Nash Smith. Most important, his wife, Jean,
provided him with the support, the love, the confidence he sometimes
couldn't find for himself. She is, in Niebuhr 's sense, a wise child of
light. Putting all these influences together with his own disposition
and abilities, May has developed an interpretation of intellectuals in
America unrivaled for its nuance, remarkable for its complexity, but
ultimately quite simple and compelling. What he says, in each of his
works, amounts to three interrelated observations. First, the story of
American thought, and American life, is the many ways in which creative
and complicated people made European ideas their own. In this strain of
his thought, he showed how the very pluralism of America became at once
its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Those, such as
Jefferson, who could find American uses for European ideas, could help
transform the world. Those, such as Phillips Brooks, who could not
accommodate himself to the new demands of labor in the late nineteenth
century, would fail to make a place for themselves. Second, he has
insisted that no real understanding of American life and thought can
ignore the centrality of faith. This is not simply the observation that
America is a nation of believers. Rather, May argues that Americans see
things through the lens of faith, and therefore as John Adams understood
Enlightenment thought, he had to understand it in an orthodox Protestant
manner. Third, May has demonstrated that life is complicated, filled
with contradictions and ironies. Simple, or in his favorite curse-word,
"conventional" analysis almost always proves to be wrong, because human
life is seldom simple and what ultimately matters is seldom
conventional. William James remains one of May's heroes because he is
constantly filled with questions. One question May has asked me more
than once over the years is, "Isn't it rather the opposite?" I have
come to think of this as his habit of reversal, his unwillingness to
accept an answer until he has checked its opposite.

I find it particularly wonderful that the university has
undertaken these oral histories, because the most important, and the
most lasting, influence Henry May has had on me, and on many others,
comes from the most ephemeral aspect of life, day-to-day conversation.
It is in these conversations that each of the elements I have outlined
appear most clearly. There is, whether he likes it or not, a bit of the
sage here. There is a lot of Berkeley and what it meant. But most
import .nf.y, there is the vision of what matters in the world: reacting

viii

on your own terms to new ideas; basing your reactions in your beliefs,
your faith; and most important, avoiding the easy, safe answers.

David T. Bailey
Associate Professor
Michigan State University

June 1999

ix

INTERVIEW HISTORY- -Henry F. May

Henry Farnham May, Professor of History at the University of
California, Berkeley, from 1952 until his retirement in 1980, is the
fifth memoirist in the oral history series documenting the Department of
History. He brings the perspective of an Americanist who developed the
field of American intellectual history at Berkeley. He comments both as
a major figure in developing the strengths and reputation of the
department in the postwar years and as a student of history at Berkeley
in the more provincial but fondly remembered 1930s. And he brings to
bear his astute historical analysis as he looks back as a participant/
observer at the troubling but exciting Berkeley of the sixties.

Henry May was not new to this business of personal history when we
undertook the oral history project. In 1987, he published Coming to
Terms', part family history, part memoir of his youth and early
adulthood- -undergraduate years at Berkeley, graduate school and marriage
at Harvard, military service in the Pacific Theater, and teaching at
Scripps College in Claremont, California. Coming to Terms ends with his
arrival back on the Berkeley campus in 1952, this time as Professor May.

The oral history was to focus on the years 1952 to the present.
But, with his historian's sensibility and knowing that Coming to Terms
was out of print, Professor May began at the beginning: from
recollections of his family and the social setting in Berkeley of the
twenties and thirties, through the years at Scripps--always with an
emphasis on themes and events which proved to be formative to his
development as an historian or shaped his response to the social
upheavals of the sixties.

Subsequent interviews delved in greater detail into the growth and
governance of the Department of History from 1952 until Professor May's
retirement in 1980; his historical research and writing in these years;
and his teaching and students. Historians of higher education and of
the discipline of history will find much of value in these pages, as
will scholars of the history of the University of California and the
social milieu of that most interesting city, Berkeley, California.

A major emphasis of the interview was a recounting of his
activities and observations during the student protest events of the
1960s. One of his goals in participating in the oral history project
had been "the opportunity to have my say on the sixties." In sending me
his notes on the topics he wished to cover for these years, he advised,

1 Coming to Terms; A Study in Memory and History, University of
California Press, 1987.

"I'm afraid I have quite a lot to say. Th;.s was, after all, my most
important experience since 1941, and much more important than anything
that came later." He commented as we talked that the book on the social
and intellectual transformations of the sixties and early seventies was
yet to be written; I sensed that if he were ten years younger, he would
have tackled the Job with enthusiasm. The account and analysis of events
he gives in these pages will be a valuable resource for historians who
attempt this task.

To prepare for conducting the oral history, I consulted the Henry
F. May papers in the Bancroft Library and his published books. Two of
Professor May's articles published in The American Scholar (Summer 1965
and Autumn 1969) on the student movement at Berkeley were instructive as
accounts of events-in-progress. Previous oral histories in the
Department of History series and others from the University History
Series were also useful, as were consultations with Professor May's
colleagues in the department.

I had been an undergraduate student in Professor May's United
States history survey class in the early sixties but had not known him
other than as a teacher. We met to plan the oral history at his home in
Kensington, just north of Berkeley, where he and his wife, Jean, moved
shortly after he was appointed to the department in 1952. Surrounded by
trees, the May home perches on the upside of a steeply sloping hill. An
electric tram lifts unwilling stairclimbers and their parcels up to the
back door, making it feasible for the Mays to continue to live in this
hillside retreat during their retirement years.

At our first meeting we talked together informally about subjects
to be covered and developed a general outline for the project.
Interviewing began on June 11, 1998, and was completed on September 10
after seven interview sessions. For each session, Professor May
prepared his thoughts carefully, making a list of topics and notes for
each area. While he responded readily to questions and additional
subjects introduced by the interviewer, he was the chief historian in
this enterprise, as one might expect of a man so professionally prepared
to analyze the social history of his life and times.

The transcripts of the recorded sessions were lightly edited by
Regional Oral History Office assistant editor Lisa Jacobson and sent to
Professor May for his review. He uncovered transcription errors,
clarified inaudible or confusing statements, and reordered a few
passages for chronological accuracy. Once his corrections were entered,
he made a final review of the manuscript in its final format. Former
University Archivist Jim Kantor provided an additional review; we thank
him for serving once again as ROHO's highly esteemed proofreader.

The oral history volume supplements the archival record in the
Henry F. May papers in the Bancroft Library. ThLrtien cartons and fcur

xi

boxes of files document his career as a historian and educator from 1946
to 1983, including correspondence, working notes and drafts of books and
articles, course outlines and lecture notes, and material on the Free
Speech Movement and the Department of History.

The Regional Oral History Office, on behalf of future scholars,
would like to thank the Department of History for providing the core
funding to make this oral history possible. Additional support came
from the Free Speech Movement Archives project of the Bancroft Library,
funded by a generous donation from Berkeley alumnus Stephen M.
Silberstein. We also thank David T. Bailey, professor of history at
Michigan State University and former student of Henry May, for writing
the introduction to this volume. Appreciation is once again due Carroll
Brentano and Gene Brucker for initiating this series on the history of
the Department of History and for their ongoing efforts in planning and
securing support to continue it.

The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to record
the lives of persons who have contributed significantly to the history
of California and the West. A major focus of the office since its
inception has been university history. The series list of completed
oral histories documenting the history of the University of California
is included in this volume. The Regional Oral History Office is a
division of The Bancroft Library and is under the direction of Willa K.
Baum.

Ann Lage
Interviewer /Editor

Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
September 1999

xii

Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library

University of California
Berkeley, California 94720

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INTERVIEW WITH HENRY F. MAY

I FAMILY, YOUTH, AND EDUCATION IN BERKELEY

[Interview 1: June 11, 1998] ttl
[Place: May's home in Kensington]

Lage: Let's start, as you said, with a reprise of Coming to Terms.2

May: All right. Coming to Terms is a very peculiar book because it
combines autobiography and a research history of my parents,
particularly my father, so the material in it is rather choppy and
the chronology a little difficult to understand.

Lage: History and memory.

May: Right. I'll talk more about this book much later in the series,
when I'm talking about my writings.

Lage: But we want people to know that they can go to Coming to Terms and
get really a very beautifully written record of your growing up.

May: Thank you. If, that is, they can find it. [laughter] It's out of
print.

Lage: Well, that's true. [laughs] That's what I forgot. But we want to
be sure that in this document we get the major themes that shaped
you as a historian.

May: I quite understand.

1 H This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment has begun or
ended. A guide to the tapes follows the transcript.

2 Henry F. May, Coming to Terms ; A Study in Memory and History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987).

Parents

Lage: So without the depth of detail that we have in Coming to Terms , why
don't you talk about your childhood and what you want to have
recorded here to understand the later years.

May: Yes. All right, I'll try. Childhood, of course is a big and

complicated topic. I was brought up in the Berkeley hills, and it
was an important fact that during most of my childhood, the family
was in some financial difficulties. They had been quite well-to-do.
And I explained this in the book: how particularly in Denver- -Denver
was always mentioned as a great good place--my father, who was an
immensely honorable and somewhat strict man with a genial side which
would come out once in a while, had had a big shock in his
professional life.

He had been special assistant to the attorney general in charge
of public lands, and that was concerned mainly with the oil lands
that belonged to the government. He had done a good job there, had
been very proud of it. He was devoted to the [President Woodrow]
Wilson administration. But when the Wilson administration started
coming apart under the pressures of war and foreign policy, his
particular enterprise came apart, too. And contrary to what he
thought he had been promised, when Harding was elected, he was
summarily fired. He read about this in the newspaper, crossing the
bay to his office.

He never quite recovered from this, so when I knew him he was a
somewhat sad man and very close to the spirit of his Massachusetts
Calvinist ancestors. He was really a New Englander through and
through, with the admirable and some of the difficult traits that
come from that background.

Lage: I don't mean to divert you, so you can just put this aside, but I'm
curious if, when you went back to Harvard, you recognized those
traits?

May: Well, no, it came from research. There were some extraordinary

coincidences here. We had a large box filled with old May papers,
and when I got to them I found that the particular ultra-Calvinist
theologian that I for one reason or another had been working hard
on--Nathanael Emmons--had preached the funeral sermon over my great-
grandmother. And there were various other connections between what
I was working on and my family history. Now, some might say this
was the hand of God, some might say it's experience, but I think
that traits in me that led me to choose this material probably come
to a certain extent from my father.

My mother, on the other hand, was for one thing twenty-six
years younger than he was. So as he got old, in a way I had a
grandfather rather than a father. My mother was warm-hearted. She
was English, from a family of mining engineers who I later learned
had, in the rather rigid English class structure of the period, a
thoroughly intermediate status --not exactly gentlemen because they
didn't have a classical education. But English mining engineers
were found all over the world. So she and her three sisters
eventually turned up in Colorado, where my father met her and after
a long and rather curious courtship, avuncular at the start, fell
very much in love with her. They got married in 1906 and were for a
while, as I said, pretty affluent.

Then when my father got this government job he moved his
headquarters to San Francisco, and that's why we were brought up in
Berkeley, as I've said in this book, surrounded in childhood by New
England eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture and by the
books which had been inherited by my father from several
generations, also. There wasn't very much in the house that dated
from after 1900, but there were things that were written after that
but in the style of the earlier period. In other words, I was not
brought up in the modern intellectual world.

Lage: Were these books that you settled into and read as a young person?

May: Indeed, yes. I read all through even the minor Waverley novels of
Scott. I read all through Kipling, I read all through Stevenson- -
those are about the most modern. I also read Shakespeare for
pleasure but not with a great deal of understanding.

Lage: Was that encouraged by your parents?

May: Oh, sure. Yes, very much so. But I really didn't need any

encouragement. I was the type of kid, I rather think now almost
obsolete, that particularly in early adolescence reads absolutely
anything. So when I learned to, I haunted the public libraries and
got out anything that I could find, and including second-rate
historical novels.

Lage: That's something you don't talk a whole lot about in Coming to
Terms. I think it's quite important.

May: Yes. It is important. And that explains why it was a shock- -very
liberating and sometimes quite difficult, suddenly to enter the
world of the 1930s at school and mostly at college.

Lage: Did you go to the picture show- -the movies?

May: Only very occasionally as a child. Nanook of the North and so
forth.

Lage: No Tarzan?

May: No, no Tarzan. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. My father

thought nothing of taking me out of school to go and see The Thief
of Baghdad. I should say this about my father: his genial side came
out every now and then when he would have a special day with one of
the children. He would take me to San Francisco, we would have an
elegant lunch at Solari's on Maiden Lane. My favorite was probably
tagliarini followed by baked Alaska. Anything went. And then we
would go either out to the beach or to the Golden Gate Park museums.
And we had a good time, though sometimes on the way home the
conversation got a little stiff.

Lage: But still he enjoyed your company, obviously, or else felt this was
his fatherly role.

May: From time to time, yes. But he was somewhat drawn into himself.

Lage: Do you have a sense of why he wasn't able to establish a career
after he lost the government job?

May: Well, yes. For one thing, let's see, how old was he? He was born
in 1860 and this would have been 1921. So what's that make?

Lage: Sixty-one.

May: Yes. He had, working for the government, drastically antagonized

most of the dominant interests in San Francisco—shipping, oil, and
so forth. That's one reason. Another is, I think, a certain
growing unadaptability. In Denver, as he had been comparatively in
Boston (he graduated from Harvard in "81) he had been very active
socially. He was the president of the University Club and had many
friends, general respect, and enough money. In San Francisco and
Berkeley, though there were good times and at first there was some
money, the change was never quite successful, I think, from his
point of view. His friends all thought he'd made a terrible mistake
when he left Denver. Why didn't he go back? I don't know.

Lage: My mother had Alzheimer's, and as you've described your father in
the course of it, do you have any sense that he might have had
Alzheimer's disease?

May: Later. Not in these years, not when I was growing up, but by the
time I was in college it had started, and then it increased pretty
rapidly.

Lage: But there was no term for it except arterial sclerosis.
May: Well, old age.
Lage: Right.

May: He didn't age pleasantly because he was so unhappy. And yet, when
there was a dinner party, I can see him at the end of the table
flourishing a knife and fork and handing out dishes. There was
never any taboo on alcohol, except that he believed in strictly
keeping the law- -this is in Prohibition, of course- -and mostly did.
There was a little brandy in a certain nook in his den. This was
used for the plum pudding at Christmas. And also at certain times,
later, the Italian Swiss Colony came down and brought barrels into
the basement and tampered with them, and so there was some very good
Sauterne which we had at meals. And he persuaded himself that that
was okay.

Lage: That was legal enough?

May: We also had an Italian cousin by marriage--Umberto Olivieri was his
name — and in California there was never a very serious attempt to
keep the Italians from having wine. What he brought was unblessed
sacramental wine, so one way or another there was a bit and never
any taboo on it. That wasn't part of that culture at all, as
opposed to some of my friends' fathers and mothers.

Lage: Yes. I identified New England Calvinism to a degree with not
drinking. Is that the wrong interpretation?

May: Yes, Calvinists did not concentrate on foibles. In fact, my father
sent to a prohibitionist friend the description of a celebration of
the installation of a minister in the seventeenth or early
eighteenth century which provided rum for the quality, and for other
people, "cider well worked."

There was never any opposition in early New England. That came
along in the reforming thirties and forties of the nineteenth
century. And it came through the evangelical churches far more than
through the Congregationalists or the Presbyterians, the remaining
Calvinists.

Lage: What about movies and dancing?

May: Movies --if there was anything faintly sexual about it, he'd been
known to walk out, followed by the whole family. This was in the
twenties. Nothing against dancing, per se, but my mother, who had
certain English snobberies, cared about the kind of friends I had,
though she couldn't do very much about that.

Lage: Did she care about their ethnicity or their manners?

May: Oh, ethnicity didn't come into it. There was nobody of any other
than northern European background living anywhere near us .

Lage: I was thinking of high school, I guess, when you went to University
High School.

May: It didn't come up much there either, really. I can talk about that
when we get to high school.

Family Religion and Standard of Living

Lage: Okay, let's continue with the earlier years.

May: Yes, all right. You have said that you want to know about family
religion.

Lage: Yes.

May: Episcopalian. My father had been a seeker all his life. In his
youth he tried everything. He was much attracted by
Swedenborgianism, as many New Englanders were, but always with much
doubt and a struggle with himself. We used to go for walks
together, and on these we would have pretty good talks. The
established custom was we would wrestle each other for his cane that
he always carried. That was okay. And once I asked him, "Dad, what
would you like if you had your first choice- -anything you wanted
right now?" thinking maybe a million dollars or something of that
sort. And he said, "Peace of mind." And that's something he didn't
have.

Lage: That's an interesting answer. Did the concern with money leave a
lasting mark on you at all?

May: Yes, I think so. Well, to give examples, I would hear my mother and
father discussing what we were going to do and where we were going
to economize. By this time he was living on investments and in the
Depression, you know what happened to them.

Lage: Right.

May: Also his investments were not terribly wise, I think.

Lage: I wondered, as I read Coming to Terms . how you were able to keep it
going at all?

May: People who came to the house, I was told long after, thought we were
rich because of the furniture and so forth. And we had one servant
who was very important in my life, who had been with the family
since the Denver days. She was old and unemployable almost anywhere
else and kept on at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month, which
was all that could be afforded. We called her Mungie, which was
baby talk for Mary. I have a chapter on her in this book- -she was a
really important person in my life. So when people saw good
furniture and a maid, which a lot of people didn't have at that
time, they thought we were rich.

Lage: But you knew this undercurrent--?

May: Yes, of worry. 1 was very attached to the house we lived in on El

Camino in Berkeley. One time there was a for sale sign on the house
in front and that made me feel bad.

Lage: After your father died—this again is jumping forward—was your
mother able to continue to keep up her living standard?

May: No, she changed it and changed her whole way of life, I think rather
heroically. I'll talk about that later. Let me say something
parenthetical: my mother died right when I was in the navy and I
came home on emergency leave for that in "46. But she had had to
take over as my father declined more and more. And since she was so
much younger, she had been- -even more, I think, than the norm in
those days—at first pretty subordinate, though she never entirely
was, at least in form. It was a very affectionate couple, it was a
very affectionate family.

Lage: So physically affectionate, are you saying?

May: Oh, yes. Yes, I would say so, rather more than many families I
think at that time. I haven't mentioned my brother, six years
older, John, and my sister, eight years older, Elizabeth. In
childhood I sometimes felt as if I had four parents. And that gave
me a distinctly rebellious streak from then on. My sister was very
nice to me as a child. I had difficulties with her later. My
brother was really not interested at all— that is to say, a boy of
sixteen1 s not interested in a child of ten very much. But later,
much later, and I'll get back to that, we became very good friends,
indeed. But it was an affectionate family, stable.

We moved from a bigger and fancier house near the university in
I think 1919. The house that I was brought up in was the only house
I lived in from then until I went not to college but to graduate
school.

Connections to the UC Berkeley Campus Community

Lage: It didn't seem as if your parents had much interaction with the
university people. Did they?

May: Yes, oh yes. They did. As for their friends, there were two

categories. One, neighbors in the Claremont district, which is a
stuffy district of businessmen, lawyers and so forth- -most of whom
commuted to San Francisco. But there were also some faculty people
— Professor Von Neumeyer in dramatic art, McCormac in American
history (a close friend of my father's), and several others. They
were always spoken of by the businessman types with a certain
respect but also a rather patronizing attitude and considered
terribly poor. When I got to college I wondered about this. Why
was somebody who's a full professor, who had so much position on the
campus, talked about that way?

Lage: Were professors poor as you look back on it?

May: Not very, in terms of the prices of those days. They had salaries
at the top of five or six thousand, I guess. My father's salary
working for the government had been twelve, which was an excellent
salary. And most of his acquaintances were much more in that
league, some of them rich. Even that one Harvard classmate who
lived also on El Camino, Henry Wagner, who was a big patron of
western history and The Bancroft Library, had a great deal more
money .

In general, they lived among people who had more money than
they did. And as the Depression came and as things tightened up,
this had its pretty difficult side. For one thing, my father and
hence my mother were Democrats and supported Franklin Roosevelt, and
for that they got socially boycotted and even persecuted.

Lage: That's very interesting! I mean, that's a strong word, persecuted.
May: Oh, yes. It's not too strong.
Lage: What kinds of things?

May: Oh, friendships more or less dropped. Well, perhaps a sort of pity
and tolerance, at best. When men of the upper middle class got
together- -say, if they're old fashioned and formal enough so they
stayed in the dining room after the women went — they'd start in on,
at best, that "god-damned cripple" in the White House. I mean,
that's mild.

Lage: These are words that you recall?

May: Not to swear to it, no.

Lage: But referring to the president as a cripple?

May: Yes. Oh, yes. And there were all sorts of anecdotes about how
somebody 'd come into his office and found him down on the floor
cutting out paper dolls. The implication was clearly that he'd lost
his marbles and I think the implication beyond that was syphilis.
But there was nothing they wouldn't say.

Lage: That's very interesting, particularly since one of the projects I'm
involved in is the history of the disability rights and independent
living movement and attitudes towards disability.

May: Yes, yes. Well, of course in Roosevelt's case, it was very
carefully concealed.

Lage: But that's why I didn't realize that those who criticized him would
pick on that.

May: Anything, anything. I mean there were jokes going around, from the
scurrilous to the really obscene.

Lage: Well, that's very interesting. I'm glad we happened upon that. Did
that push your parents any closer to the campus community, the
university? Weren't they a little more liberal?

May: Perhaps so, because the campus community was liberal, yes.
Lage: Was this Professor [Eugene) McCormac?

May: Very much so. He was a very strong Democrat who would joke with his
colleague, Professor Paxson, about their differences. But the whole
atmosphere, north of the campus particularly, was quite different-
more liberal, much more intellectual; from my point of view, just
more interesting.

Lage: Was that something before you went to Cal that you were drawn
towards or was this something you were aware of?

May: Well, Cal is a very old association. That is, I was taken by Mungie
in the First World War to see the soldiers drilling on the campus .
And my mother's best friends probably were the Misses Hilgard, the
daughters of Professor Hilgard, who had been a very important
figure--! 've treated him in some of my writings. So the campus was
always there. And my father had a good deal of great respect for
the faculty. Mr. McCormac told him once he should have been a
professor and would have made a good one. But as it was, he had
been a lawyer from hf.s youth.

10

Lage: Well, I think this fills in a little bit from Coming to Terms .

We're getting some new things here and getting the important things,

May: All right, good.

Grammar School Years

May: Now we haven't gotten into school.

Lage: I'm interested in what you're interested in but also in the public
school aspect of your education.

May: Yes, all right. Well, I'll be fairly frank about that. In grammar
school I went to John Muir School, the neighborhood school. The
students were mostly from the upper middle class, like the
neighborhood. The exceptions were Shu Wong, who was treated all
right but regarded as very special, and Italians—the large family
that worked for the gardener of Mrs. McDuffie, the wife of the real
estate tycoon.

Lage: And they lived on their estate?

May: Yes, and there was one of them in each class. When the class got

together to have a party, the question was should we invite Angelina
Celeste or leave her out? That was the main discrimination. Jews,
I hardly knew about—that is, I had very little idea that Jewishness
mattered at all. My mother was an excellent singer- -professional
caliber, a serious singer. Her singing teacher was Lawrence
Strauss, a well-known teacher in this region, and when he was coming
to dinner, my brother would make a certain number of jokes about
serving bacon or ham and that kind of thing. And it was recognized
that that family and their children were somehow different. But
when I encountered Jews in school, I didn't have much of an idea
that Rosenbaum was any more or any less an American name than say
Murphy. [laughter]

Lage: Of course, there's a lot of prejudice against the Irish.

May: Not here. I didn't encounter it.

Lage: Until you went to Harvard, it sounded like?

May: Oh, yes. Very different indeed. But in grammar school, since I was
a bookish boy brought up mainly by women, I naturally had a pretty
tough time. Very poor at any athletics, took a good deal of beating
for that. Also, bright in ways that were not popular. This was a

11

story of, I would say, a good 50 percent of the people who end up as
professors.

Lage: Yes, right. [laughter]

Family Trip to Europe II

May: Suddenly, shortly before I had finished grammar school, I learned
with great excitement that we were going to spend the next year in
Europe.

Lage: And that proved to be an important experience for you.

May: Enormously, and in a lot of ways. It was a bold decision of my

parents, who now were none too well-off. I suspect that my mother
had proposed it because my father was unhappy and sad about his own
career and this would be a way to take his mind off it. Anyway,
both of them had very good memories of being in Europe earlier. So
we decided to take this year off from our usual pursuits.

Of course I loved the trip on the ship both ways. Children
always do. We started by paying a visit to my mother's family in
Bournemouth in England. Her stepmother and her half sister, I think
rather bravely, had prepared for this unknown American family.

Lage: Was this the first time they had met you?

May: It was the first time they had met anybody in the family, the first
time they had met my father. My father, of course, was about the
age of my step-grandmother, which perhaps complicated things. They
were awfully nice to us, tried very hard. I think that the children
were not as bad as they feared. We got along pretty well and did a
lot of sightseeing in Dorset and Hampshire—cathedrals, castles, and
so forth—and spent some time in London, all very exciting.

But then we went to Belgium, which somehow has played a rather
special role in my life [laughs] and where my father had traveled,
and on to Paris, which for both of them— as for me, later— seemed
the great good place. We stayed there some months, enough so that
living there was beginning to be taken for granted—and not just as
sightseers. We stayed in a small hotel on the Left Bank and
traveled a bit in France from there, but mainly in Paris.

Lage: How receptive was Paris to Americans at that time? Do you remember
any of your experiences?

12

May: Well, it was the great time for Americans in Paris, of course, but
my family were completely unaware of Gertrude Stein, Ernest
Hemingway, and so forth. There were also American tourists, and the
hotel had several American and English tourists. But it was still
rather an exceptional thing to go for a long time.

Lage: Yes, I would think so.

May: Some did.

Lage: Did your family speak French?

May: My sister did. I did, 1 learned to a certain extent. My brother
roughed it and my father, though he read it very easily, couldn't
speak a word.

Lage: And your mother?

May: She had okay French, yes. She'd spent some time there studying
singing in her youth.

Lage: Did this trip have any effect on your love for history?

May: Oh, my, yes. Sure. I already had a good deal of that, but this
gave me the sort of romantic interest in the past that I think is
there whether they admit it or not in most people who go in for
history.

The story of this wonderful year was complicated for the whole
family by the fact that 1 got a serious case of diphtheria--! must
be one of the later sufferers from that disease. If this hadn't
happened I might have been sent to school somewhere. As it was I
was rushed to a very good American hospital at Neuilly, a suburb of
Paris. There, as a matter of fact, I had a splendid time.

The nurses were mostly White Russian emigres and very charming
and pleasant. And then when I got in the men's ward, since I was
the only kid there, I was made much of and on the whole had a better
time than I was having outside and was rather sorry to leave.

Lage: Does that speak poorly for the time you were having on the outside?

May: A good question. Mostly I loved being in Europe, but what I lacked,
completely and acutely, was society outside the family and
particularly, of course, people my own age. We all went to Menton,
on the south coast of France, for some sunshine, and then I was sent
back to England to finish recuperating. My Aunt Nina did her very
best to invite boys my age for tea and we had a little dog somebody

13

had left, so I had a pretty satisfactory time for the first time
away from my parents.

Lage: You have described this year as your first great remembered

experience. I loved that phrase. Do you still stick with that?

May: I'd say "first great remembered good experience." So powerful, in
fact, that I had a hell of a time getting over it.

Junior High and High School

May: You can imagine, I'm sure, what it was like to come back to junior
high, always a tough period, after a year in the company of adults,
talking more than ever like a book, and full of memories that nobody
was at all interested in. So, seventh to ninth grades were not
easy. No use going into detail. Eventually, the other boys got
more interested in girls than in pouring gravel down my neck. Also,
I learned to adapt. I'd gotten passable at some of the sports.

II

Lage: Sports was really a rite of passage?

May: Oh, it was utterly important- -an hour of gym every day. I got okay
at everything but baseball--couldn' t catch a ball or hit one. Or
tumbling: I was too weedy and long to be able to do a somersault off
a trampoline. I couldn't have done that any more than I could have
flown out the window. But in basketball, soccer particularly,
whatever else we did, including boxing occasionally, I was all
right.

And also I knew how to talk. I didn't talk like a book anymore
in school, as I had. Also I met a very nice girl, brought up partly
in Europe, and we had a certain calf love affair, I would say. So
by the time I got out of high school things were getting distinctly
better.

Lage: Where did you go to high school?

May: University High, for both junior high and high school. Six long and
very formative years. It was a very special school. It was not in
a good neighborhood. Eventually the school turned into Merritt
College, which you've seen in a derelict condition on Grove Street
[now Martin Luther King, Jr. Way]. There were some pretty tough
kids there, kids of bootleggers among them. But there were also a
lot of people from the hills, including some faculty kids, who got

u

in by petition. There was a modus Vivendi between these two groups.
Mostly the locals were Italians, and so you would have an Italian
kid elected as chief justice if an Anglo kid was student body
president. This was all very tacit.

Lage: All kind of unspoken?

May: Yes, but there was a very advanced student government—of course,
largely fake and run by teachers, who helped keep the balance
between groups .

Lage: Do you think that teachers were working behind the scenes? It seems
like such a sophisticated thing for kids to work out.

May: Oh, kids are pretty sophisticated in things that are absolutely
immediate to them. I'd say the big tough Italian fullback had
campus prestige, but so did, say, the student body president who was
Anglo—we didn't use that term, but who was from a prosperous family
and from the hills. But when it came to dating and so forth, these
divisions didn't altogether hold because you get attracted to one or
another girl and boy.

Lage: So there was some dating across those lines?

May: There was some dating across those lines.

Lage: What about friendships, for going home and after school?

May: There was some of it— mostly not, because they went to different
places. If it was a couple miles from where we lived I sometimes
walked and usually went on the Key train, so there was a certain
very loose and free kind of segregation, mostly tacit. Of course,
all that we read or were taught was about democracy, and one
wouldn't have said anything derogatory about the other group except
maybe in private if there was somebody you really disliked or
something like that. And it worked pretty well.

The other thing that was special about Uni High was that it was
where the university trained all their student teachers. That meant
that we had a quite splendid core of senior teachers who were in the
education department at the university, ex-officio. And then we
always had a succession of student teachers, some of whom were
terrified and abject, and to them we gave an awful time, but
occasionally somebody brilliant because it was the Depression and
there were people who were in graduate school, who would have liked
to have had a Ph.D. and taught in college, but had to teach high
school. I had some great good luck in that respect.

Lage: With good teachers, challenging teachers?

15

May: Yes, very much so. There were some very good ones. One that I talk
about in this book was a student teacher in Latin who had an
advanced class of four, I think, that went through a great deal of
Latin literature, especially poetry, which turned me on. And
another was a creative writing teacher, Miss Eileen Power, who
deserves to be commemorated a bit, because not only did she have us
write in all forms--! wrote mainly poems and essays, too—but she
encouraged us to send them to magazines and told us how to do that,
what form letter to write and so forth. And I got several things
published when 1 was in high school.

Lage: That's quite interesting. You wouldn't think of that happening now,
really, unless it was sort of a special publication.

May: No, I don't think so. The whole culture was much more bookish than
now. This is all long before TV. As for radio, when I was in
junior high school, like most kids I had a crystal set. And by
wiggling this little wire very carefully, you could get in your
earphones rather clearly the dance bands from the Claremont Hotel,
which was about two blocks away. And that was big stuff.

Lage: Oh, that was big stuff! You didn't hear things from more distance?

May: No—well, very seldom. In grammar school we were all taken to the
assembly, I remember, in 1925 to hear the inauguration of President
Coolidge. And you heard crackle, crackle, crackle with, "I do," and
that's about what it came to. So books were it. If you had any
taste for general information, literature, history, it was books.
And an awful lot of kids--a minority but a big one — read a great
deal.

Lage: Did most of your classmates from John Muir go down to University
High?

May: Very few. No, they mostly went to Claremont Junior High and to
Berkeley High.

Lage: And what distinguished those who chose to go to University High?

May: Well, their parents had a special wish and went out of the way and
petitioned for it.

Lage: So it was serving the locale and then those who petitioned?

May: That's right, yes.

Lage: But were they ones who wanted greater intellectual stimulation?

16

May: I'd say they heard it was a better school. I don't know that it

was. From people I knew who went to Berkeley High that was a very
good school, too.

Lage: Interesting. I was struck—this is jumping ahead, also—but when
you mentioned World War II, one of the experiences was being with
the cross section of American society.

May: I'd learned how to get along by that time.
Lage: But in University High you had some of that?

May: I had some of that, and I'd say that was very possibly the most
important part of what I got from there . I did learn how to get
along with various kinds of people and what to say and what not to
say.

Lage: You mentioned that people didn't refer to themselves as Anglos. How
did they refer to themselves to distinguish from the Italian groups
or others?

May: People from the hills, usually.

Lage: What about attitudes towards girls? Were the girls intellectual
equals?

May: Well, I don't suppose the attitude toward girls was different from
what it always is, but the taboos, of course, were stronger than
later on. I was, I'd say because of various things in my
background, particularly timid, so in my relations with girls up to
this point and long after, I never got very far in the physical
relations. An occasional kiss —

Lage: I was thinking of the intellectual relations. [laugh]

May: Oh yes, entirely equal. There were some very intellectual girls,

one of them with whom I'm still in touch is one of the few people I
know alive from there. I don't think there's any harm in saying my
most important girlfriend in high school was named Helena Steilberg.
She later married Ed Lawton in the music department here after
spending some time at Harvard herself.

Then there was another girl, now dead, with whom I was
certainly never in love, Edith Holden, who was rather homely and
very bright. And she and her divorced mother- -who'd lived in Europe
a great deal—from high school through college—they were very poor
— lived in an apartment behind the house on Ellsworth Street and
served green tea on Thursdays to a sort of hyper- intellectual bunch.
Green tea was ill they cc aid afford.

17

Lage: Oh, green tea was an economic thing, not a Buddhist thing? [laughs]
May: Yes, not a cult thing, no.

University of California. Berkeley. 1933-1937

Lage: Okay, should we move you to Cal, then?

May: All right, why not. Getting to Cal, for me, was liberation.

Because we were so broke I lived at home, which I very much don't
recommend and which had some bad consequences. Nonetheless, it was
a different world and I quickly found myself at home there. I was
delighted that none of my mixed high school reputation followed me
at all.

Social Life and Extracurricular Activities

May: I also was very thrilled at the beginning when I got rushed by

several fraternities. The fraternities, then, were having a very
hard time paying their mortgages, so they almost immediately tried
to pledge anybody who came along. But it was terribly flattering
and I joined one but found after a while I didn't really need it and
so was allowed to drop out without the usual letter being sent
around that does social damage.

But I had immediately, almost, wonderful friends, I thought and
still think. My closest friend, now dead, like most of my friends,
was Burr Overstreet, who was the son of Harry A. Overstreet, the
very popular psychologist professor in New York. His divorced wife,
Elsie Burr Overstreet, lived on Canyon Road. She was very
hospitable and Burr and I became very close friends. We went on a
trip together between freshman and sophomore years in his car; I
could hardly drive, and we didn't have a car. We went to a lot of
places, including Yellowstone and Teton and so forth.

Lage: That's quite a trip.

May: Oh, yes. And then he and I and another friend went on a camping

trip in Oregon in the next vacation. We would sometimes—innocent
amusement enough- -play Monopoly all night, and Mrs. Overstreet would
serve us breakfast. We talked immensely about world affairs,
radical politics, everything else. Then I had other close friends,

18

but I don't want to go over them one by one- -one or two of them from
high school.

Lage: Was it 1934 when you entered Cal? I just want to get a date on
here.

May: '33. Then the Occident, the literary magazine, went into hard

times. I was invited to become the first chairman of the editorial
board and then editor. And that was an absolute high point in my
college life. We, I think, put out a good little sheet. I've got
copies of it.

Lage: How did you come to be editor? Had you published in it?

May: No, it was probably through the English department, where I'd had

writing classes and done well enough, I think. Or word of mouth, I
don't know. Anyway, we tried to get somebody outside of the campus
to write and we netted contributions from, let's see, an interview
with Lincoln Steffens, and through Emmy Lou Packard, an artist who
died recently, we got a sort of interview with Diego Rivera. Then
we got an original story from Gertrude Stein. She was a friend of a
young man who was a freshman on the Occident back then, who later
became a very well-known poet, so we copyrighted that issue. And
anybody who ever wants to put out a complete Gertrude Stein would
have to get it, I guess. It was a good story and not hard to
understand.

Lage: What year would that have been?

May: I'd say "36. No, more likely '37, when I was a senior. We tried to
make it a campus review rather than just a strictly literary
magazine, though we did publish poems and stories.

Lage: From students?

May: Yes. The Occident gave me another social circle, and then there
were other circles. One, a north Berkeley circle that I've
described in the book, I was on the fringes of. Mostly faculty
kids, strictly from north Berkeley, highly intellectual, rather
austere- -the-milk-and-graham-cracker set. And they were very
musical.

Lage: So we have green tea and then we have milk and graham crackers?

May: Well, that's a totally different group. [laughs] But I tried very
consciously not to confine myself to intellectual sets, but to know
other kinds of people, too. And the result was, I'd say, a really
pretty rich social life.

19
Academics

May: And also courses were important. Benjamin Lehman, whom many people
remember, taught a course called "Writing in connection with reading
certain great books of the nineteenth and twentieth century." And
we would read, say, Whitman, or well, even Willa Gather, and then
write anything we wanted- -poem, story, essay. He was a rather
gushy, emotional lecturer. The two teaching assistants there were
literary people and not above snidely caricaturing him. They had
some of the students to their apartments, where we read each other
our stuff. That was a great experience, that course. It was a
sophomore course .

Lage: Are you saying that he was maybe not intellectually as high level as
you might have wished?

May: Well, no. He was a dramatist and that's what you want for an early
college teacher. He was a Freudian: [with intoned voice] "Where did
the white rabbit go? Into a hole." [laughter]

Lage: This course left an impression?
May: Yes.

Lage: Did it introduce you to literature you hadn't read it before? Or
had you been exposed to all of it?

May: Oh, yes, and most exciting, too. That was the most exciting

process. Of course, a very big thing was reading Whitman, as it is
for all adolescents, I think. I don't remember that we read Marx,
but we certainly read Marxists.

Then in my junior and senior years I took seminar sorts of
courses with T. K. Whipple, who was a good writer who wrote
occasionally for the New Republic and so forth. And this also
attracted mostly the pretty heavy intellectual set. In general, the
literary intellectuals at Cal at that time thought as a matter of
course they were about the brightest people anywhere. They weren't
right, but it was very good for us to feel that way, I think.

Lage: Did you find out differently when you went on to the next step,
then?

May: Yes, I did. But I had, in other words, a pretty good time—not

without certain hang-ups. I was awkward around girls, which I was
very conscious of. And I also was inhibited in other ways and got
in the habit of working rather compulsively to make A's, and I don't

20

think that's good for anybody. But I needed the fifty dollars or
the hundred dollars in scholarships.

The money arrangement was unsatisfactory. My father was broke,
but if I asked him for five dollars or ten dollars he always gave it
to me. And this put, of course, a good deal of emotional pressure
on me not to ask, so I had various jobs, all of which I hated:
demonstrating Campbell's soup in grocery stores, reading to a
skinflint old man who would have me read three hours to him and get
him a glass of lemonade and not give me one, that sort of thing.
That's what you did in those days. Thirty-five cents an hour was
good.

Lage: Sort of demeaning type of things?

May: Yes. Oh, yes.

Lage: Had your brother and sister gone to Cal?

May: My sister went for the first two years at Cal, then when we went to
Europe she stayed there and studied music. Then she came back and
got a teaching credential at Mills and taught. For a while she was
a student teacher at University High—and got a good many echoes of
her brothers.

I've always thought I was fortunate because my brother and
sister remembered when the family was very well-to-do and they
associated with rich kids. I was absolutely in my element at Cal.
My brother went to Stanford, had a car and an allowance, was in a
fraternity.

Lage: So just six years before, your father was able to afford that?
May: Well, he did it, anyway.
Lage: Or tried to afford it.

May: It was difficult. Yes, but I would not have wanted to go to

Stanford, at least I thought I wouldn't. Who knows, if I had gone
there. But Cal was absolutely my happy home and I'd try to find an
excuse often to have dinner at The Black Sheep and stay and study in
the library at night.

Lage: I remember The Black Sheep.

May: Yes, it was where the English department hung out. Do you remember
Fritzi, the owner?

21

Lage: No, I don't remember it that well. What was the image of Stanford
then in those years? Was it a rich boy's school?

May: Well, we thought of it as that, yes.

Lage: Because at one time I thought it'd been started to--

May: Oh, it was, that's right. It was started as quite the other way,
but by this time it had become — the image, from Cal anyway, was a
rich man's school. And we thought we were superior. [laughs]

Lage: We still do!

May: Certainly we were more cosmopolitan, and there were more kinds of
people here. I think that's so.

Lage: You've mentioned several groups, and now I'm getting back into the
ethnic and rich and poor: did these groups that you were in cross
the lines of social class?

May: Oh, yes. The business manager of the Occident was a guy named Sol
Ivanof f--Jewish with a New York background and a pretty strict
Marxist. I remember that he thought that literature or anything was
not worthwhile if it didn't pertain to the class struggle. And I
remember asking him one time, "Sol, isn't that just as if you were
in the Middle Ages and said that nothing that wasn't relevant to
Christianity was worthwhile?" And he said, "Yes, that's what they
said and they were right." That stayed with me.

Lage: At that time?

May: Yes. Most of my friends, close friends, were from either the same
ethnic background or Jewish. As for class, some of my best friends
lived in Oakland, were quite poor, and took the streetcar to
college. And you know, this didn't make any difference,
particularly in an intellectual sense. Now, the milk and graham
crackers group was strictly north Berkeley academic kids. Of course
there were differences in background and upbringing, but that didn't
make any difference in social life or, particularly, intellectual
life. Not at all.

Sports and Campus Politics

Lage: What about involvement with the sports teams and going to games,
that kind of thing?

22

May: Well, I liked going to the football games. And after I got to know
Burr well, we sometimes sat in bleachers on the top of his mother's
house, where you could see the game almost as if it was a map. You
could see it almost as if you were in the press box. But
occasionally, even then, my friends would move down into the rooting
section because it was a lot of fun. Burr actually was on the
fencing team and had a circle C. None of my friends were
participants in major sports, but we got excited in Big Game week
and went to the rallies, particularly the all-male rally in the gym
before the big game, when the extremely obscene songs were all sung.
There was sort of a controlled frenzy for Big Game week.

The two chronological episodes every year were the events of
the Big Game week when nobody talked anything about politics and
then the yearly Peace Strike at Sather Gate where a few thousand
people congregated.

Lage: Was this every year?
May: Yes, yes.

Lage: What were they striking for? I mean, there wasn't a war at that
time that we were involved in.

May: Not that we were involved in, directly, but remember the Spanish
Civil War, also the Japanese in China. As I see it now, this was
part of the extreme confusion of the movement, because on the one
hand people would carry signs--"Schools Not Battleships"--and there
was a strong pacifist element; on the other hand, "Aid the Spanish
Republic" or "Aid China."

Lage: Were both of those elements present at the peace strike?

May: Yes, but peace in general covered opposition to ROTC on campus,
belief in disarmament, and suspicion of war makers, bankers,
munitions makers and so forth, but also sympathy for the Spanish
Republic and/or China with generally a very respectful but pretty
uninformed attitude toward the Soviet Union. But I'd like to come
back to all that.

Lage: Okay, this is just the poles of experience.

May: Yes. One week the radicals had to themselves, another the sports
crowd--

Lage: And you seemed to do both.

May: Oh, yes. And lots of people did. One didn't preclude the other at
all.

23

Lage: But I'm sure there were those who didn't even pay attention to the

Peace Strike. It doesn't get talked about a lot in many of the oral
histories.

May: Well, doesn't it? With Cal people from this period?

Lage: Yes, it seems like it was just on the very fringes of many people's
awareness.

May: Yes, well, I'm sure you couldn't help but be aware of it. Some

professors canceled their classes out of sympathy, others took roll.

H

May: The legend was that the ROTC sent people to cut the loudspeaker

cable at one point. Another legend was that there were people from
Buildings and Grounds taking photographs of all the people there.
But really, what I still believe, I guess, is that groups in the
smaller towns of California that really wanted the university broken
up did have photographers there.

Lage: You mentioned that in the book, and that was something I wasn't

aware of either, that there were people who wanted the university
broken up.

May: Oh, yes. I have cartoons in my file from the Hearst Press, from the
Examiner, of people with brooms sweeping commie professors out the
door and so forth. In other words, there were periodically
political attacks on the university.

Lage: So when you say broken up what do you mean?

May: That the money would go to a number of campuses and not just
Berkeley.

Lage: I see. In the local areas?

May: Yes. In this time, of course, there was only Berkeley, plus what
was called the Southern Branch.

Lage: Yes.

May: But for us, the University of California meant Berkeley.

Lage: Did you have a very strong perception of President [Robert Gordon]
Sproul?

May: He had a wonderfully strong voice. He would come to rallies,

university meeting.1, and say how he believed in free speech but not

24

the excesses that are sometimes called free speech. And he had a
wonderful voice for singing the university hymn, which I love. "0
God Our Help in Ages Past" echoed very nicely around the stadium and
so forth. Walking through the campus, he greeted quite a few
students by name, and if you didn't know him you'd say, "Good
morning, President Sproul," or something. He was very, very good in
that sort of way. And he dealt and bargained with the radical
leaders. Sometimes he did what they thought he should, sometimes
not, but he was pretty skillful on that kind of thing.

There was a great deal of freedom—that is, by the time I left,
the Daily Cal was a radical newspaper. The ASUC executive committee
was divided, but some articulate radicals were there, too. So all
this wasn't anywhere near blowing up as in the sixties, but there
was enough radical activity to get plenty of denunciation from
certain parts of the press and from my family's acquaintances in
Claremont [section of Berkeley).

I remember once a very dear friend of my parents, a couple,
came to dinner- -and I don't think I'll use the names. Mrs. X said
she ' d heard there was a poll taken on the campus that said that the
three greatest men of the nineteenth century were Freud, Marx, and
Darwin. And I said I didn't know anybody who didn't think so, and
she was really horrified. [laughter]

Lage: Now, how did your parents accept this kind of thinking?

May: All right. When I told my father that most of my professors thought
we'd made a mistake to get into the First World War and it had been
a matter of British propaganda and munitions makers and bankers and
so forth he said, "Henry, I'm sure you must have misunderstood
them."

Lage: That's a wonderful way to respond. Did that end the discussion?

May: No. On an abstract or national level I could always talk to my

father. My mother was not a political person, but she talked to me,
and with great effect, about all sorts of personal matters and
behavior and so forth. And I loved her very much. About my father
I can't quite say that. I was somewhat afraid of him.

Lage: As you talk about your father, you tell an awful lot about the
relationship between the two of you.

May: Yes.

Lage: There really was one.

25

May: Well, there was one, but the sad thing is that he could be somewhat
tyrannical. And what I needed was a revolt, but by the time 1 was
of an age and had enough confidence to do that, he was failing so I
never--

Lage: So you couldn't do that.

May: Couldn't do that, no.

Lage: But you mentioned earlier today a rebellious streak.

May: Oh, yes.

Lage: Now, how did that manifest itself? Is that later or is that during
these years?

May: No, I think I developed, in this period but still more later, almost
a compulsion to be on the minority side—less so when I was at Cal
because the majority there was very simpatico and very liberal in
both senses.

Radical Politics at Cal

Lage: Now you mentioned talking about politics at Cal in the thirties.

May: I think there's not much doubt, though it's really at some times

unpopular to say so, that at the center was the Communist party with
which people were to one degree or another partly sympathetic.

Lage: The center of the radical movement?

May: Yes. There was an articulate and open Communist group. There were
also people who they weren't sure whether they were or not, and
there were people who were very close fellow travelers, in which I
put myself at that time.

Lage: Was there not as much need to be secretive about it as there was in
the McCarthy years?

May: No, not so much. Well, it's not just that, it's that in Communist
history, the period of the early thirties was one of their ultra-
radical periods, centering in Germany, really, where they were
fighting pitched battles with the socialists. So then socialists
were social fascists and any moderates or liberals were very bad
people.

26

Then they switched in '35 with Earl Browder and developed the
slogan "Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism" and became very
vocal with their versions of the American Revolution, the Civil War,
and whatnot. And what they would say to people who were on the
borders was, it really doesn't matter whether you go along with us
or not, except assuming you believe in world peace and progress and
the New Deal as far as it goes. Because the time is coming when
there will be a choice: you'll either be a Fascist or a Communist
and that'll take care of itself. That was the general line.

The organization that was most important was the American
Student Union, which as I remember had the planks of world peace,
support for students, racial equality. But who was against those,
you know? I never could quite join that because I guess I was a
little suspicious, but I went to their meetings and cooperated with
it a good deal. Then there were a few religious pacifists and
socialists who were sometimes in these meetings but distinct. And
then, of course, a large group of students who were thoroughly
unpolitical—apparently like some of the people you've talked to--
but would probably be more liberal than conservative on the whole
and more likely to be Democratic than Republican. But I, at this
point, tried very hard to go along as much as I could with the close
fellow traveler group and had some difficulties.

Lage : Now, what did it require to go along with the close fellow traveler
group? Was there a lot of discipline or positions that you needed
to endorse?

May: There were positions that you needed to endorse and I usually did.
Let's see, what were the big dividing points? Well, everybody was
for the New Deal but it didn't go far enough. Everybody was for
socialism and eventually we'd have to come there. Then in foreign
policy the question was following the very sharp changes of the
party. But this was one of the easier periods when people like me
and my friends were perhaps critical of the Soviet Union but were
for having good relations with it, and for respecting it, and
defending it, and denying the terrible things that some people said
against it at the time of the purge trials.

Lage: Was there a lot of information about the purge trials?
May: Yes. There weren't many Trotskyites.
Lage: There were not, you say?

May: There were a few, but not many in this whole region. The center of
radicalism in the region was the Longshoreman's Union, the center of
the general strike of '34. Harry Bridges, the leader of the
Lrngshoremen and the general strike, was never proven to be a

27

Communist, but followed their line pretty closely. I learned much
later, talking to Trotskyites and other dissident radicals, that
even they respected him, because he had done so much for the
waterfront unions. But you know that story.

Lage: Just to put a little footnote here: I recently heard a talk by a man
who's doing a biography of Harry Bridges and who's gone to the
Soviet Union and looked at files of the American Communist party.

May: Fascinating. Those files put a whole different light on all this.

Lage: Absolutely, and he feels that Bridges does seem to have been in the
party. Maybe not a very disciplined member.

May: He was a Communist, actually?
Lage: It appears that way from the files.

May: Yes, I see. Well, I knew later at Harvard that there were people

that they preferred would not come out in the open, who were of more
use otherwise. There were doubtless people like that but not on
campus circles. The professors were far left to liberal almost to a
person--! could almost say to a man--in those days. [laughter]

Lage: Yes, probably.

May: Now, in San Francisco, the Communist party was a real party with

some real organization and some prestige. The waterfront had great
prestige. You were supposed to admire the CIO and particularly the
maritime unions. But the choices were not terribly hard because as
long as you were essentially on the right—by which I mean the left
--side, you weren't particularly pushed.

A typical instance is when John Strachey, author of the Coming
Struggle for Power, which we all read, came and gave a speech here.
Somebody, probably a provocateur in the audience, said, "Can we get
to socialism without a violent revolution?" And he said, "That's
entirely up to the capitalists," avoiding it a little bit, you see.
But in general, in this period, the divisions were not as strict as
they were later. And anyway, most people at Cal, including most
with radical sympathies, regarded the group of well-known, more or
less full-time Communists as a bit dull and rigid, and not very
interesting, though essentially right. And that's as near as I can
describe it.

Lage: That's an interesting time.
May: Yes.

28

Lage: You have the Henry F. May collection of protest handbills in The
Bancroft Library. What were they?

May: Well, those were the ones that were given out every day at Sather
Gate and I collected them. They were mostly of the left but there
were a few of the right. There were some Trotskyite. In many,
Communists were involved.

The one big incident that I took part in, and it has a lot of
resonance with what happened later, was at a time when the police
decided that handbills could not be handed out at Sather Gate
because they cluttered the streets. And that evening a girl whom I
knew to be a Communist called me up and said, "Well, Henry, what are
you going to do? This is a straight free speech issue." So with
many doubts I went down and handed them out. All the assistants
from the philosophy department were there, for instance.

Lage: The teaching assistants?

May: Yes. We had made a point of giving pamphlets to the cops. The

ordinance was dropped, and this ended the trouble on that particular
bit of turf, which was later to become [laughs] rather important.
So I had that in my background when it came to the Free Speech
Movement .

Lage: So there were no arrests made?

May: No, there were no arrests. There had been some but they were not
pushed.

Lage: Of course, at this time Sather Gate was the edge of campus.

May: Yes, that's right. But it was pretty much the same turf where
things popped quite a bit later.

Lage: [laughs] Were there students from the sciences that were parts of
your intellectual or radical group?

May: Honestly, not many. Nor the engineers. My next door neighbor and
present very close friend, Jack Murchio, was in the same class. He
was in biology. We didn't know each other until we met here much
later. No, the group I'm talking about- -and this should be made
clear—is, I would say, perhaps three or four thousand people at the
most in a campus of 15,000.

Lage: Yes, that would make sense.

29
A Serious Girlfriend

May: There's another topic at Cal that I discuss in Coming to Terms

that's very important, and that's my girlfriend Jane. She was a
pretty serious girlfriend, and we'd even talked about marriage. But
she wouldn't consider that unless I left home. She saw, correctly,
that living at home was partly responsible for my inhibitions. And
she didn't want to be a faculty wife; I'd have had to do something
else. She was very good at working in fancy department stores. I
guess the thing I considered, when I dreamed about it at all, was
going to New York, where I would do my best to get started as a
writer and she would work, and for a while she'd bring in most of
the money. Then I hoped like everybody to get on the New Yorker, as
they did take editors of college literary magazines sometimes.

And well, I wasn't ready. That would have taken a certain
amount of passion, not only for her but for making a big break with
my family and with everything else. I wasn't ready for it.
Excellent girl. When I was writing Coming to Terms I tried very
hard to find her. I think she's dead. We lost touch. And to get
ahead, by the time I met Jean, whom I married, I was ready. I was a
rather backward young man.

Lage: Well, you were young, after all—thinking of being ready.

May: Yes, twenty-two by the time I left Cal, delayed by the year in
Europe.

Hiking Experiences ft

Lage: You haven't told me yet about your hiking, something I always

connect with Bay Area people. Tell me about what role this played
in your life.

May: A very big one. My friends and I loved to go hiking in Marin

County, and it was a point of honor with us that no term papers,
exams, or anything stood in the way when one of these was proposed.
At that time the way you got there was to take the ferry to San
Francisco, then a ferry to Sausalito, then from there another train
--there was a Mill Valley route and a Fairfax route—and then walk.
You could walk from one to the other. We'd walk sometimes a good
twenty miles. All people who know each other pretty well—boys and
girls, with no great tensions about that. Then at the end we would
usually come back to San Francisco and have dinner together in an
inexpensive French or Italian restaurant, of which there were many,

30

and be rather proud of the fact that we were in dirty, sweaty,
hiking clothes.

Lage: This must have been a very long day?

May: Yes. That was what was good about it. [laughter]

Lage: Is that something you kept up over the years?

May: Yes. Always loved the area and always loved to hike.

Lage: Did you start out as a younger person hiking on this side of the
bay?

May: Oh, sure.

Lage: Up in the Berkeley hills?

May: Yes, oh, yes, the Berkeley hills were just fine for that.

Lage: Now was that something when you went East that people also did?

May: No. The area around Cambridge isn't particularly conducive to

hiking. You have to go a long way. There are the Blue Hills, but--

Lage: But this kind of release from school?

May: No, I don't think there's any city, even now, like San Francisco in
the fact that you can get from the city to wonderful country in
almost any direction very easily. These hikes, the easy, casual
atmosphere, the beautiful country, the singing, were an epitome
of my life at Cal, and exactly what I missed most in my first years
at Cambridge.

Leaving for Graduate School at Harvard University ii

May: Now, as for going to Harvard, I was very torn about wanting to be a
historian or another kind of a writer, but I needed a means of
support. My father didn't have anything except a $1000 bond which
was in my name, and I could have that and then try to get
scholarships. Well, I applied for scholarships and normally with
the campus record I have, I should have gotten one. 1 have some
theories about why 1 didn't but never mind that.

Lage: That sounds interesting.

31

May: Well, wrong choices of faculty sponsors, let's say. Naivete". I

competed for a Rhodes Scholarship and got to the San Francisco stage
and my very close friend, Bruce Waybur, won it. I went home with
him to his family celebration. It wasn't altogether easy. But he
was going to Oxford and I went to Harvard. I'd learned from various
people that if you went to Harvard and could get through one year,
you usually got on the gravy train and got assistantships or
something and would be taken care of. Turned out not to be true in
my case, but anyway, with very little money Bruce and I- -he going to
Oxford and I to Harvard—left on the train for the East with a
pretty good crowd at the station singing songs and so forth that
we'd sung on our Marin hikes.

Bruce and I went East by train, by coach of course. This was
the first of a lot of train trips across the continent by coach.
That was a very important experience, itself, the trip. That is,
the first time it was as exciting to me to go through Reno, Omaha,
Chicago, as it would have been Paris or London, it was so strange.

Lage: Now why was that? Was it the times?

May: Well, because I had gotten awfully interested in American studies.
That's why I tried to switch: I wasn't an English graduate student
but a history graduate student.

Lage: Were you an English major at Cal?

May: No, I was a history major but I took more courses in English, I

think. Anyway I was enchanted with the train experience, with the
people we met. I can go into detail about that; some of them were
pretty interesting. And when we got to Cambridge it looked very
exciting. I didn't know the difference between an eighteenth-
century red brick building or one that had been built in the
twenties, but it all looked quite different from Cal--a little
frightening but most exciting. But after a very short time I became
extremely unhappy, homesick and in winter subject to bronchitis and
so forth.

Lage: So it wasn't easy.

May: It was a tough transition, but eventually I was able to adapt to it.
But you see, this is a transition that one ought to make leaving
home at eighteen to go to college. I'd lived at home. That was
something that I don't at all recommend. So this was a real break.

Lage: So this was a break from the West and the break from the family at
the same time.

May: Yes, it was. Yes, both.

32

Lage: And from the happy provincialism of Cal, as you've described it
elsewhere.

May: Yes, that's exactly right.

Choice of History as an Undergraduate Major
[Interview 2: June 24, 1998) II

Lage: A topic that we missed that seems pretty central to this story is
why history? We didn't really get into that last time. And why
American history?

May: As an undergraduate at Cal I took somewhat more courses in English
than I did in history, but I was a history major. My interests and
most of my courses had been in European history. So why American
history? That, I think, is part of a development connected with the
left-wing popular front. In this period America seemed significant
and interesting and it was still somewhat unexplored in terms of
folklore, literature, and history. It seemed open and inviting.
And there was, perhaps, a certain sense of duty in it- -that it's
what one ought to do.

Lage: Is this another kind of romantic feeling that was attached to it?

May: Oh, well, sure. [laughter]

Lage: I'd like to hear more about that romantic feeling!

May: Oh, I think it's the one word in cultural history that's the most

difficult to define, but I think I'll qualify, and always have, as a
romantic if it means that in the long run one follows something
other than a rigid reasoning process. I think that one seldom
completely understands the reasons for one's choices. I've done
better when I've admitted that and taken chances. As you might
guess, the writer on this kind of thing that I've found most
congenial is William James.

33

II HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL, 1937-1941

Train Trip to Harvard

Lage: We've talked last time about your train trip back to Harvard, and
that even seems to be part of this engagement with the country.

May: Well, that was great fun. It was always by coach, and there's a

certain art to traveling by coach: how far you can stick a suitcase
out in the aisle to put your feet on without having the conductor
trip over it and that sort of thing. After a night of sitting up,
particularly after two, people are very cordial and exchange all
sorts of reminiscences. And there were all sorts of people. Now,
for instance, one time a guy got on who'd been let out of prison
somewhere. And everybody liked him. He was very popular, but then
after he got off it was discovered that somebody's wallet had gone
with him. In other words, it was a broadening of social
experiences .

Lage: Right. [laughter]

May: As I remember, it cost eighty dollars round-trip, and you could
choose any route you wanted. And I tried them all- -the most
exciting probably through the south, stopping in New Orleans. The
south seemed very much a foreign country. And all the other routes
on my way back and forth, and saw a lot of the country.

Lage: Would you stop and get off?

May: In New Orleans for three days, yes.

Lage: What about the Grand Canyon? Did it go through the Grand Canyon?

May: No.

34
Difficult Adjustments

Lage: Okay, shall we get you to Harvard, then?

May: Yes, to be sure. Well, going to Harvard for graduate school- -it was
hardly a decision. You went if you could because the rumor was
that's the place that got you jobs. And also the rumor was that if
you did all right your first year you got on the gravy train and got
some sort of support.

Lage: So if you had ambitions towards a Ph.D. and a professorship at a

college-
May: Yes, Harvard was, on the whole, where people went. As I've tried to

explain, it was a hard adaptation for me, especially coming right

after my happy times at Cal.

My parents had given me introductions to family, friends, and
relatives in Boston, and I dutifully went and called on them rather
formally and learned something there. They were cordial enough but
didn't know what quite to make of me- -not used to western young men.
And nor was I, of course, used to them.

Lage: Could you describe how western young men were different?

May: Well, I think I can do it anecdotally as I have a bit in the book.
The daughter of my father's best friend of his youth, Miss Baker,
was not married and lived with Miss Lothrop in a house on
Marlborough Street. It was a typical upper-class Boston house of
that period: living room upstairs, a couple of maids, with family
portraits, and that sort of thing. And when I went there with other
guests for a Sunday dinner, Miss Lothrop would have been talking to
several people about prep schools, particularly: how Groton was
going to get along, now that Peabody had retired, and "Where did you
go to school, Mr. May?" "University High School, Oakland." "Oh."
That was the only answer she could possibly make. [laughter]

"And what is it you're studying at the college?" "History."
"What kind?" "American History." "Is that all?" [laughter] That
floored me because I thought it was quite a lot. But they were nice
enough and somewhat educational. And later, when I found my feet,
these acquaintances largely ceased to exist. [laughter]

The first years there were on the whole a pretty bad time. I
was in Perkins Hall, a graduate dorm which is really pretty
forbidding—granite corridors and metal steps and so forth—and
rooming with a man who is really a very nice guy I met in Berkeley
when he was on a visit, but a Vermonter and not similar in interests

35

or tastes, let's say. And I missed everything—the climate, the
landscape, my family, my friends--and also was very underfinanced,
didn't eat very well.

Lage: The food wasn't part of the package?

May: No, you'd eat at the Greasy Spoon on Harvard Square and try to save
money. I was sick a good deal. During the winter I had bronchitis
all the time. Also, people were tired: as I hadn't known it was
possible to do, most of the graduate students in every field arrived
at the library at nine in the morning, stayed there until noon,
after a brief lunch went there for the afternoon, and came back in
the evening until ten o'clock.

Lage: Did you get the sense that this was a carry-over from their
undergraduate days?

May: I don't think so, no. But a part of a very competitive graduate

school atmosphere. For instance, in American history, when somebody
got a straight A in a seminar, the news was all over right away
because that meant he'd get an assistantship next time. It was that
sort of atmosphere.

Lage: Very competitive.

May: Yes. Very competitive and not very cheerful. However, there were
compensations. I made some friends, particularly—this turned out
to be significant- -a group from Bowdoin College, which I'd never
heard of, who were very much "Harvardolaters" and—

Lage: Harvard what?

May: Idolaters of Harvard.

Lage: Oh, yes.

May: --and quite different in their experience and assumptions and who
regarded somebody from California as a bit outlandish. But we got
along very well and there was even a literary group that wrote
poetry and read it to each other—intellectuals, sort of an
ambitious literary group.

Lage: Did you join that activity?

May: Sure, yes. Well, that is, my friends and I started it.

Lage: Oh, I see.

36

May: It was utterly informal, just in the dorm. I ate my meals at the
Episcopal Theological School, not because of any religious
affiliation but because they served good meals fairly cheap. There
were very few divinity students at that time, so it was mostly law
students with some others. Whether for these reasons or not, in my
first semester I had rather mediocre results and did not get any
fellowship for the following year. But since the courses were year
courses, by the end of the year I'd got them all up to A or A-minus
so the authorities wanted to help me.

Went home. Very happy to be home. Fine summer. And then when
I went back, I had $400 left and I got a proctorship in the hall,
which put me supposedly in charge of discipline in the hall.

Lage: That's a big order for somebody young. [laughs]

May: The main controversy that I had to deal with was about rolling beer
cans down the metal steps which kept people from studying. And I
survived that year. I wiped dishes in the theological school and
refectory. There was a rather primitive dishwashing machine, and
I've had a dislike for peanut butter ever since because the dishes
came through with peanut butter still on them. It was all a bit on
the grim side.

Lage: Was there a social outcast aspect to having to work washing dishes?

May: Well, a little.

Lage: That may be a little strongly worded.

May: Yes, a little. That is, I felt I'd rather do that than be a waiter.
I'd rather be in the kitchen than giving my acquaintances food.

Lage: Waiting on your friends, that's right. You weren't the only one
working your way through, I'm assuming.

May: No, but I was poorer than most at that point.

Punster House

May: Then I had this wonderful break. I got appointed to a special job
"counselor in the extracurricular study of American civilization,"
which meant living in a house and quite a decent salary for my age
and the times.

Lage: This *as for your third year?

37

May: Yes, and just an utterly different life altogether. The house
system had the one great virtue: inside the house there was a
different hierarchy from outside, so that graduate students would be
on ostensibly equal terms with senior faculty members, so that I
could talk with distinguished younger faculty like Paul Sweezy, the
leading Marxist economist, or even with his friend and opponent
Joseph Schumpeter, a great, conservative, Austrian economist.

Lage: Were the faculty associated with the house, too? Was that the idea?

May: Yes, they were in the house. Dunster House had a faculty economics
forum which was of great interest. Economics at that time—this is
during the struggles of the New Deal—had the status that physics
had after the war, perhaps. It was a central discipline that
everybody was interested in. The Dunster House forum was a pretty
exciting affair.

Also I enjoyed the association with students not much older
than I was. The second term I was appointed assistant senior tutor,
which is the third in the house hierarchy. So occasionally I had to
preside at meetings. When the master and the senior tutor were away
skiing, as they were sometimes, I was in charge of the house. That
was quite difficult. I was by that time living in a very friendly
and egalitarian way with many of the students, and it was hard to go
from a cocktail party in somebody's room to the dining room and have
the job of putting down bread- throwing, for instance. [laughter)

Lage: Oh, so that's the kind of responsibility you had, kind of keeping
order?

May: Yes, but there were others: taking part in the admissions process- -
which I go into in the book but don't want to particularly here. In
this job I made some very good friends, probably the most important
of them Henry Nash Smith, who was a year or so ahead of me and very
obviously in a position of leadership among the graduate students;
he was older, had been teaching a while. I've written a
biographical study of him. He became for a long time my good angel,
that is, looking out for jobs for me and so forth. And we were very
good friends.

Then there was a whole circle of brilliant graduate students
and young faculty. I talked in the book a lot about one of them,
Jack Rackliffe, an eccentric radical and a very gifted man with a
strong penchant for self-destruction. He affected my whole outlook,
moved me farther to the left than I had been politically, and gave
me a code of conduct which was the opposite, let's say, of
prudential.

Lage: So no playing it safe?

38

May: Yes, taking chances. Going all out.

Lage: Which really wasn't part of your make-up, as I've gathered here?

May: Well, this helped a good deal.

Engagement and Marriage to Jean

May: And so I was very happy and, partly through Jack's guidance, much
more expressive and particularly expressive of my emotions than I
had been before, which I think explains the big thing that happened
in that period, which was my falling very violently and suddenly in
love.

Lage: That's an important part of your life, so we don't want to skip
that.

May: [laughter] I should say not! Well, all right, a bit about that
episode. It was a Dunster House spring dance and the girl that I
usually took to dances was busy. I'd failed essentially with her,
by the way, and never, let's say, got anywhere. And I remembered
that one of my Bowdoin friends, Eddie Benjamin, had appeared at the
dull graduate dances with a girl that seemed very lively,
interesting, nice looking. So I called her up and asked if she'd go
to this dance with me. She said she would. We had a particularly
good time and I said, "When can I see you again?" And that was
certainly within a couple of days. And the result was that within
three weeks we were firmly engaged.

Lage: That's a very short time!

May: Yes. [laughter]

Lage: She must have had this code of not being prudential, as well!

May: Well, no, I think the best way to state it is that we were both

ready, as I had not been with Jane, my college girlfriend. So then
it was a matter of letting our parents and our families know.

She lived in Portland [Maine] and went home on weekends, and
was working as a secretary at a psychological clinic in Boston.
When I wrote home, I wrote in no uncertain terms that this was quite
different from anything before. And I've always been proud of my
mother's response. She accepted this entirely and sent Jean a small
present.

39

It was a little more difficult with Jean's grandparents. They
at first seemed to accept me, looked up a few things about my
family—there were connections in Portland—and had me up there,
finally, and put on a great big engagement party. But then Jean's
grandmother, the powerful person in that family, decided that she
wanted us to put off our marriage until the end of the summer. We
had no idea of doing that and so she decided that I'd always had
shifty eyes.

Lage: Oh! [laughter]

May: And there was a real break. But at that point Jean's mother came to
the rescue and invited me up to Toronto where she and her husband
lived- - Jean ' s other home. She spent part of her time in Portland
and part of it in Toronto. That went well, so she gave it her
approval and we were married in June.

Lage: Now was this June of your third year or your fourth year?

May: Fourth year.

Lage: Was it after you were finishing at Harvard?

May: No, I wasn't finished. By this time I was assistant senior tutor

and I was riding pretty high and, you know, thought I was at the top
of my profession and so forth. Jean's grandmother didn't think so.
That is, since I had no money and no very firm job, which is
understandable .

Lage: You can probably appreciate it more now than you could then!

May: Oh, yes. And we later became very good friends. I think almost

anybody would have been a bit on the wary side. But anyhow we were
absolutely determined. And we did get married and found a place in
Lincoln—at that time a beautiful suburb of Cambridge. Spent the
whole summer there riding bicycles and eating mostly mackerel, which
was six cents a pound, and having friends out from Cambridge. But
then, of course, the chill came toward the end of the summer when it
was necessary to figure what to do.

I should say that after we were engaged, while I had thought
that I would continue to be a tutor for several years—and that was
the normal impression—the chairman of the department called me in
and said that while they thought very highly of me, there wasn't a
vacancy and so they were giving me a traveling fellowship. And
since you couldn't go to Europe at that time or anywhere else and
there was no reason for me to, he thought it would be okay if I went
to New York. So our plans were for Jean, who had, after all,
secretarial skills, to work and me to live on this $1,200

40

fellowship- -not too bad in those days—and work on my thesis in New
York. However, that wasn't exactly how iu worked out.

Mentors and Influential Professors

May: Now do you want me to go into anything else before I leave Harvard?

Lage: We haven't discussed specific professors and ones that might have
influenced your thinking.

May: All right, I'm glad to do that. The three great people in American
history were professors [Arthur M.] Schlesinger, [Samuel Eliot]
Morison, and [Frederick] Merk. And then the great teacher and
scholar in American studies in the English department was Perry
Miller. I was a student of Schlesinger, who on the surface was a
rather unemotional, not particularly inspiring teacher who taught
American social history, which amounted to everything but politics-
more or less from the invention of the detachable collar to the
sewing machine and so forth.

Lage: Is that a Carl Bridenbaugh type of social history?

May: He was Bridenbaugh 's teacher. Bridenbaugh 's social history was

Schlesinger ' s type of social history. Schlesinger had an enormous
number of students and had a great gift for letting each person
choose his own topic that he was interested in.

Lage: With guidance or with a hands-off kind of approach?

May: With conferences. First he had me thinking of doing a California

project, but that didn't really work out. And then he said, "Well,
one of my students is doing the churches and slavery, so why don't
you do the churches and capitalism, but don't call it that. It
sounds too radical."

Lage: [laughs] He was not a radical, I gather?

May: No, he was a lifelong and ardent and active liberal. He'd been a

socialist--! later found out--in the early twenties but most of the
time he was a fervent New Dealer. That's what he was.

Mr. Merk, his colleague, taught a very famous course in the
western movement. He was an immediate student of Frederick Jackson
Turner- -really economic in interpretation. He was an encyclopedia
of knowledge about all periods of American history and a terribly
nice man; everybody was fond of him. And this :ourse was very

41

famous. I audited it and I took his seminar. And how can I express
it? He was naturally and obviously a good man, I'd say, and in
politics, deep down rather to the left of Schlesinger, but you'd
never know it from any of his teaching.

The other one, Samuel Eliot Morison, was utterly different: old
Boston for one thing, arrogant in manner, a great literary
historian. A typical glimpse of Morison--in his colonial history
course we spent a lot of time on the discoveries because he was at
that time tracing the routes of the explorers in boats. He used to
say, "There was a time at Harvard when they would assume that any
student had a knowledge of sailing small boats, but I think I'll
have to tell you something about navigation." [laughter] Also he
asked his assistant — adoring and exploited assistant—if I came from
the Boston May family. And Ralph, who didn't know, said yes. So I
was invited to dinner at his house and there he treated me very
politely, of course, and poured the wine and so forth.

Lage: He was a true Bostonian.

May: Oh, utterly. And very deeply. Later wrote an awfully good little
book about that called One Boy's Boston. The anecdotes are legion.
He comes into my life again in a little bit and I'll leave that to
then. Then Perry Miller was an exciting, opinionated, somewhat
overbearing man, domineering.

Lage: Over his students?

May: Yes, over everybody. And a man given very much to drink and to

talking, rather embarrassingly, about his sexual exploits. He— I
have always thought—modeled himself a good deal on Ernest
Hemingway. Remember, he was a professor of literature, but what he
had discovered was the interest in American religious history, which
nobody knew anything about. And so I audited— graduate students
after a certain period didn't take courses but listened and did the
reading--! audited his first course in American religious history,
which opened up any number of things. And since I was writing a
thesis somewhat in that area, he invited me to give a lecture. But
you never knew with Miller, one day he would be very pally and
egalitarian and the next day very icy.

Lage: Was he intellectually exciting?

May: Oh, very. Immensely. He's been much criticized. In fact, there's
a whole industry of criticizing Perry Miller. But he is the person
who rescued the Puritans in the first place from the hostility of
people from Mencken on, including historians who thought of them as
a grim and forbidding bunch. Miller put in the center stage their
theological views. One of his phrases is that they dared to look

42

straight at the sun, that is, to contemplate the fate of man without
mitigating the probability that they and other people might spend
eternity in torture. And he went on right up to more or less
contemporary times. That course was formative for me, but so was
some of his other teaching.

Lage: You mentioned you studied American civilization. Was that something
unique to Harvard? Was it new?

May: They were early in having a formal program. I was not in American
Civilization. Henry Smith was, but that's something people have
asked me always: why I wasn't in that. I think I had a liking for
other kinds of history and thought American studies, though it was
broad intellectually and in terms of its discipline, was a bit
narrow in its national concentration, perhaps. I'm not sure that
that's why. Anyway, I stuck to history but took a lot of courses
that were taken by people enrolled in American Civilization,
officially.

Dissertation

Lage: Now, let's just look a little bit more about your thesis topic

choice. It just seems like it forecast later interests. Had you
already delved some into church history?

May: Not at all.

Lage: Schlesinger just said, "Why don't you--"

May: Yes, he studied church history very much as a part of American

social history, very much from the outside. He said that he was
impervious to religious feelings. When I got to know him well,
working with him, I noticed a portrait on his wall. "Who's that?"
"Oh, that's Reiny [Reinhold] Niebuhr." They were associated in a
lot of liberal causes.

Lage: I see.

May: But Schlesinger was interested in religion as one of the influences
on American social history, worth studying as such. Of course, I
did not consider myself at all religious at this time, and I had to
try to get in the frame of mind of people who were. And I spent
quite a lot of time reading theology and particularly books on the
social teachings of the churches, starting with Ernst Troeltsch, the
great German church historian.

43

II

May: The first great break I got was when I submitted my thesis to
Harper's religious department. They accepted it. It was very
unusual for a thesis to be accepted for commercial publication. And
that's the fact on which my next few jobs --not my next job, but
after a while, after the book came out, that was the main thing that
brought me, for instance, to Berkeley.

Lage: We'll come back to that, I hope, about the publication and the
reception of that book.

May: Yes, right. I'm getting way ahead there because it wasn't published
until well after I left Harvard.

Lage: After the war.
May: Yes.

Ethnic Prejudices at Harvard

Lage: I'm just looking to see what else we don't want to miss from Harvard
besides the political. Do you want to talk about the ethnic
attitudes at Harvard?

May: The traditional statement is that, "The Bostonian loves the Negro,
tolerates the Jew, and hates the Irish." And that's not too far
off. Of course, Harvard then, more than the other New England
colleges, was in the process of becoming cosmopolitan with their
national scholarships, mainly for people from the west. And there
were lots of Jews from New York up there who were among the
brightest and best, but still had trouble getting jobs. And all
this is something that had the finest possible nuances. For
instance, in Dunster House I spent a lot of time with a particular
group of students without at first realizing that they were Jewish
and finally learning from one of them that they were the second best
Jewish group in the house. [laughter]

Lage: So they were very aware-
May: Oh, my! Were they, yes. And one wouldn't not be, not possibly.
Lage: But you came at it a little bit naively it seems?

May: I was naive when I got there but then, of course, I was a political
radical utterly opposed to this sort of discrimination, as was

44

everybody that I knew in theory—and I think most in practice, as
well—among graduate students, junior faculty, and so forth. But it
was still there very strongly among the undergraduates.

Lage: Was the group of political radicals that you were involved with
diverse ethnically?

May: Not particularly, no. In the houses the young faculty mostly had
been Harvard undergraduates .

Lage: So they hired from within?
May: Oh, my, yes.

Evolution of Political Attitudes

Lage: Should we talk more about the evolution of your political thinking?

May: Well, as an advanced undergraduate and tutor and so forth, I was

under the tutelage of Jack Rackliffe. I was very much a Communist
fellow traveler, more than I had been in Berkeley. And this was a
period still when that was comparably easy to be. I never joined
the party, but really was fairly close in most of my thinking then.

Lage: Was the party discussed?

May: Oh, yes.

Lage: Did you know who was in the party?

May: Well, no, I wasn't sure. I had a pretty good idea, but it turned

out to be partly wrong. Later, somebody I know talked to the Senate
Internal Security Committee so there was a definite list and I was
surprised both at some who were in the party and some who were not,
who I thought were. There was a fairly thin line in those days but
membership was essentially secret.

As we learned later from these revelations--! didn't know this
at the time—an organizer from the party would come and talk to the
group at Harvard. But he didn't tell them to slant their teaching
at all—he knew that they wouldn't— but rather urged them to join
the teacher's union and turn it their way.

And that brings me to the big political crisis which came with
the various twists and turns of the Communist line. When I was home
in Berkeley one summer, I think probably between my second and third

45

years at Harvard—well, let's see, we can be exact about this. In
'39 came the revelation of the Stalin-Hitler pact, which shook us
all tremendously, but I managed to bring myself to decide that it
had been a matter of self-preservation or something like that.
Anyway, I didn't leave the left then.

Lage: Did you decide this while you were still out here in Berkeley, or
was this a discussion after you got back?

May: Well, both. But then that meant that during the argument that

developed in 1940-41 about aid to England and Roosevelt's policy of
approaching gradually full support of the Allied cause, the
Communists and people who followed them were violently against this.
The slogan was, "The Yanks are not coming." And I, to my later
great regret, stuck with that. At Harvard this was a minority
position among the faculty as well as the students. That is, most
were ardently in favor of aid to England. And mixed with good
sense, there was a certain amount of Anglophilia, which I didn't
like.

Lage: So that turned you off.

May: That turned me off.

Lage: Even though you had the roots of family- -

May: Yes, even though or because. My father had been a tremendous

Wilsonian so I was an anti-Wilsonian, naturally. So I stuck with
the Communist anti-war line in that period. Of course had to
register for the draft in Harvard but hoped I wouldn't get drafted
because I was getting married. A few days after we were married in
Toronto, came the next bombshell: the Nazi invasion of the Soviet
Union. And that turned all the Communists immediately into pro-war
patriots, and most of the anti-war organization at Harvard, which I
had rather naively joined, collapsed. So from then on one knew that
one was going to be in the war. I theoretically was willing but in
practice, of course, didn't look forward to it.

Lage: Now what about pacifist feelings that were so strong in the inter-
war years? Was that part of this?

May: Not really. At Berkeley and at Harvard—but Berkeley more—there

were pacifists who allied with the Communists and other radicals in
things like the annual peace strike. At Harvard I wasn't aware of
them. What I was aware of was a few Trotskyites. Now, it's an
interesting fact, and I have commented on this elsewhere, that by
this time a large part of New York intellectual life was former
Communist, anti-Communist left, Trotskyite, the group in the

46

Partisan Review. Edmund Wilson, many others. But that was not how
it was at Harvard.

I should go back here and mention one other professor, F. 0.
Matthiessen, who was of course a very gifted scholar of American
literature and who was the patron of a lot of the people I knew in
American studies, broke with Perry Miller over aid to England, which
he opposed.

Lage: Against aid to England?

May: Yes. The tutors like me were mostly members of the teacher's union,
which was affiliated with the Boston AFL [American Federation of
Labor] of all things—a pretty different group. The climax in the
whole argument about aid to England and attitude toward the war and
related issues came with a motion in the teacher's union chapter to
give five dollars to the American Student Union, which was in the
anti-war position. And that broke up friendships. It's in any
number of memoirs .

Lage: Now were you deep into that?

May: Oh, yes.

Lage: And you must have voted to give the money?

May: Yes. I was very anti-war. This was before the Nazi invasion, so
people were under the influence of Communists and some others who
were not were very much on the other side. Matthiessen was in all
sorts of groups with Communists, for which he was later violently
attacked. It had something to do with his dreadful suicide, but he
was also a Christian—rather unusual in those circumstances— an
Episcopal lay reader. He was his own man except he had a rather
sentimental attitude, I'm afraid, toward the working class, of which
he was by no means a member but of which he wanted somehow to be a
part.

Lage: How do you explain this kind of fierce attachment of the fellow
travelers? Did this all grow out of the Depression?

May: Yes, well, that had started, in my case as I have said, at Cal. One
had to try to explain why if one was a decent guy and a liberal, one
was not a Communist, why one didn't side with the people who were
really committed to the socialist future. That was the line always
in any period. One didn't ever know much about Russia, but kidded
oneself a good deal. The attraction really, I think, most was the
all-out demand- -that people wanted something to which they could
sacrifice themselves.

47

Lage : To kind of be a true believer.

May: Yes.

Lage: Was your friend Jack Rackliffe an important part of that circle?

May: Yes.

Lage: So this is part of his--

May: His ambience, very much so. And since that all came out later,
there's no real harm in my saying that he was a Communist.

Lage: Did you realize it at the time?
May: Pretty much.

Lage: But it was definitely a hidden thing? People weren't able to just
say, "I'm a member of the party."

May: Yes and no. In the period of the popular front some people did.

For instance, there was an immense stir at Harvard during my first
year in Dunster House when Granville Hicks of the New Masses, a
leading communist literary intellectual and who was in the open, was
appointed. He was very violently attacked in Boston, which always
liked to attack Harvard for whatever reasons. As a symbol of the
attitudes, the city council at one time seriously debated a proposal
that the names Lenin and Leningrad should not appear in any book in
the library.

Lage: [laughs]

May: Which would have been almost impossible for Harvard. That is, this
was a social antagonism and the Communists and pro-Communists were
very heavily upper middle class and the lower middle class very
violently the other way.

Lage: That's an interesting way that it broke down. Now did this affect
the course of studies? I mean, the attitude of a professor to his
student? You mentioned the break between Miller and Matthiessen.

May: Well, yes. The aid to England was the center of it, and when I was
against aid to England, I certainly felt a good deal of pressure. I
have often wondered if the fact that I was very articulate on that,
even in the local press, didn't have something to do with their
decision that it would be better to give me a fellowship than a
tutorship.

Lage: A traveling fellowship! [laughter]

48

May: Yes. Not a fellow-traveling fellowship, though. My doubts were

increased during the year of my first teaching at Lawrence College,
when somebody was given exactly the tutorship in Dunster House that
I had had. But I can't prove this.

And may I say, parenthetically, that this position opposing aid
to Britain was a fatal mistake. It shows that trusting the heart,
which is right in many things, is all wrong when it comes to
politics. I took this position mainly because most of my close
friends did.

Lage: How did Jean fit into the political swings?

May: Oh, well, she being brought up in Portland was surrounded by

Republicans, but her grandfather—a wonderful man, a professional
painter, her step-grandfather, actually, somebody very influential
in her life- -was head of the Portland Museum of Art School and was
sort of the tolerated eccentric in conservative Portland social
circles. She had been influenced by him to differ from the dominant
conservative political circles. And so when she met me, according
to what she's often told me, she was attracted for one thing that I
was the first westerner she'd met, and for another that I was the
first radical. Both were entirely positives. [laughter]

Lage: So those were pluses for you.

May: Yes.

Lage: And she fit into the circle of friends that you had?

May: Yes, very much so. To summarize about Harvard, I think my first two
years in Perkins Hall brought out all the compulsive and repressive
part of my personality, which was plenty. And the second two years
loosened me up a great deal and prepared me to trust and express my
emotions a bit more. Those I think are the most important effects
of that period.

Lage: You don't choose the intellectual stimulus as the important effects?
[laughs]

May: That was there anyway, I think.
Lage: But the other's important.
May: Yes.

49
First Faculty Position at Lawrence College. 19A1-1942

Lage: Okay, now you've mentioned that the thought was you'd go to New
York. And did something intervene?

May: Yes, I got called in by Professor Merk. There was a job at a small
good liberal arts college in Wisconsin, at Lawrence. The former
head of it, now the president of Brown, was Henry Wriston. So of
course I took the train down to Brown and was interviewed.

Lage: So he was former head of Lawrence, but he interviewed you for the
job?

May: Yes, he still had a good deal to do with running Lawrence in

absentia. We talked for a while and he said, "And I suppose you're
one of these modern agnostics?" I said, "Yes, sir." And he called
and got the president of Lawrence on the phone and told him to take
me and to give me a salary of $2,000. And he said, "I suppose you
know, May, that we could have gotten you for $1,800." And it was
quite true. [laughter]

Lage: What an attitude! Jobs were not easy to find, is that correct?

May: Jobs were very hard to find right then. You didn't turn one down.
So we took the train to Lawrence, were met by the president of the
college. I don't know that I'll say his name, since he becomes
rather the villain of the piece. He was a pretty oppressive figure
and it was a very hard transition for me from the brilliant Dunster
House circle to this small college. The change is epitomized by the
fact that I'd been attending the history faculty meetings at
Harvard, at least the less important ones, as a tutor and here the
first college meeting, about the same size, was occupied a good deal
with the new sprinkling system that had been put in the college
lawns.

Lage: [laughs] And the faculty got involved in that?

May: Oh, yes. You got involved in what the president told you to get
involved in. This was a pretty grim year—awfully cold, for one
thing. Twenty below for several weeks and a bit cold in other ways,
too. And I was working terribly hard. I taught two new lecture
courses the first term, and the president added another the second
term. Since I was utterly over-conscientious and timid about
lecturing- -which I hadn't done before, or hardly, and therefore was
concerned as young lecturers are to have enough material--! worked
awfully, awfully hard, suffered dreadfully from insomnia, and in
general didn't have a very happy time.

50

However, we did make a handful of very good friends, all of
them more or less on the left and all of them real opponents of the
president. Another little point about Lawrence was that the college
was a Methodist foundation. It was officially dry, so the main
street was lined with bars. And if a faculty member ran into a
student there, each of them knew he had something on the other. So
that was more or less all right, but in faculty entertaining if you
had beer on the table and somebody rang the door, always as a matter
of course, you'd quickly put it in the closet before you saw who it
was.

Lage: This was in a private home?

May: Yes, oh, yes.

Lage: That's quite amazing.

May: Yes, and I became one of those on whom the president had his eye as
a dissenter and he started weeding them out pretty soon.

Lage : And what caught his eye about you?
May: Opposition in faculty meetings.

Lage: I see. You spoke up too strongly on the sprinkling system,
[laughter]

May: No, it came to other things—drink, for instance. "I suppose there
are some people here," he said one time, "who think that learning to
drink should be part of your college existence." And about half a
dozen of us put up our hands and that was curtains, pretty much.
But of course, one wasn't fired easily. In a small college one
isn't because one's part of a social nexus, even without tenure.
And firing somebody is a kind of a traumatic event for the whole
group, so it's done gradually.

But we had this group of very good friends. And one, named
Howard Troyer, was one of a wonderful type that there is likely to
be in small colleges: the patron of the young and the dissident. He
could talk to the president and he could also talk to us, and so he
made things a lot better than they would have been otherwise.

Lage: He was older?

May: Yes.

Lage: He must have been.

51

May: But the year was a strained one. We got along all right on the

salary. Jean, like the proverbial bride, was learning to cook and
anyway we couldn't afford much variety, so we mostly had Jean's
grandmother's meatloaf. And when we entertained we had meatloaf
with mushrooms and served beer. Excellent Blatt's beer was fifteen
cents a quart, so we could drink a certain amount of beer.

Lage: And did Jean work?
May: No.

Lage: Did she not work because now she was married and didn't have to
work?

May: Faculty wives didn't—very little—not for a long time. That was
the pattern. She kept me going and that was hard enough. But we
managed to get our teeth fixed, rather badly, and even save some
money for going to Berkeley in the summer.

Lage: So you survived.

May: I think that's about it—survived. That was a year to survive.

52

III WORLD WAR II

Return to the Bay Area

May: Then in the summer [June 1942] we went to Berkeley for Jean to meet
my family.

Lage: And that was the first time she'd met your family?

May: That was the first time, yes. My mother by this time was living in
a smaller house than the one we'd been brought up in--a very nice
and small house. And still Mungie, the servant who'd always been
there, was around. Meeting her was as important as anything else.

We moved out, first to a house in Berkeley, and then later
moved to San Francisco, where we found an apartment on Filbert
Street, halfway up the hill to Russian Hill. And at that time Jean
did get a job, and I did, too. I thought I would probably be in the
armed forces one way or another pretty soon and wanted to get that
over with.

Lage: Had you quit Lawrence when you moved out?

May: Not formally, no. Well, that's a little bit of a story. I had

started trying to get into one thing and another because I knew I
would have to get into the army or navy, and wanted to under my own
power. This was a position that was not uncommon. It's the
position in Saul Bellow's novel, Dangling Man, of somebody who was
not in the armed forces but thought he would be. I got a whole
series of labor jobs which could be had for the asking. And that
was a real experience for me.

Lage: That must have been a relief after this preparing of lecture
courses .

May: It was a great relief. In fact, what I had to learn about labor
jobs is that when you've done something, you don't ask a foreman

53

what to do next, you goof off until he tells you. That kind of
lesson was useful and very different. This was an all right period,
I applied to various military programs and was turned down.

Recruitment and Training as a Japanese Translator

May: And then what happened was that Professor [Albert E.] Hindmarsh in
Japanese history at Harvard came to San Francisco [in December 1942]
to recruit people for the Japanese language school. There were very
few people who knew Japanese at that time and they wanted
translators and interpreters and so forth very badly. What they
wanted was people who'd had some intensive experience of some kind
of intellectual work. Mostly they got graduate students, some
lawyers, some businessmen. So I went to be interviewed by him at
his hotel and we talked a little while and he said, "Well, I think
you'll find it nice. You'll like Boulder, on the whole." And 1
said, "Well, sir, have I any chance of getting in?" "Oh, you're in,
you're in." And so that was that.

Lage: And Boulder was where the training was?

May: Yes. I was absolutely overjoyed because I had the two things I

wanted: to be in the armed forces, which I thought was inevitable
and wanted to get over with, and to still be with Jean for a long
time, because the program was at least a year. It turned out to be
fourteen months. So we went to Boulder.

Lage: You weren't eager to pick up the gun right away?
May: By no means.

Lage: [laughter] Okay. Well, you get different stories about World War
II.

May: From different people. Oh, yes, well, I was all for the war, of

course, by that time, as were all the radicals, with the Communists
as the center of it more even than anybody else. Some Communists,
incidentally, fought heroically. But it was fine with me to be
doing my duty by studying Japanese and living in Boulder—a very
nice place to live.

Boulder can only be described as a strange interlude. The navy
had taken some Japanese out of the relocation camps on the west
coast, and had prepared the townspeople, telling them the Japanese
were coming, were important, and were to be treated with respect.
So we had all sorts of teachers — some of them teachers of little

54

children from the language schools in San Francisco and Los Angeles,
some of them from other professions, a few Caucasians who had lived
in Japan and really spoke the language well. We were divided into
sections of five and we worked very hard. We had to learn a certain
number of characters every week. You're nowhere if you don't know a
good thousand or fifteen hundred fairly well, so most of the work
was on the written language, which is much easier to teach, of
course, than the spoken language. And it was a very good lively
group of people. 1 had good friends there.

Lage: How was the group's attitude towards the Japanese teachers?

May: Extremely respectful. That is, you would call them sensei, teacher,
and you'd bow slightly when you met them in the streets and so
forth. That was how it was.

Lage: And they were Japanese-American?

May: Yes, Japanese-American, or as I said, a few Caucasians who lived in
Japan, but they had to have very good Japanese obviously. And there
were all sorts of comic aspects to it. Some people gave their dogs
Japanese names and one couple actually gave a child a Japanese name.
So, while we were at war, a particular atmosphere was a great
respect for things Japanese. The books we were using, which had
been developed for embassy children, talked about how we poured out
our blood on the plains of Manchuria and so forth.

Lage: Oh my goodness! That was very ironic!

May: Yes. Not all was about that, there was a lot of folklore and so
forth. They posted grades every week, comparative grades, and we
were under navy discipline, though the married people fared
infinitely better than the people who had to live in the dorm in
Boulder, where there was a strict little martinet, a former
education professor, that tried very hard to be navy. The teacher
would practice on our honorifics. First they would ask, "Do you
respect Captain so and so?"--he was the head of the naval unit's
language group—and then, "Do you respect Miss Walne"--she was a
former missionary, the civilian head of the school—and then, "Do
you respect Lieutenant Conover?"— and so forth, each using a
different kind of honorific. It's a terrible mess of a language
because it's adapted; there are Chinese characters adapted to
Japanese sounds, so any character can be sounded at least three or
four ways.

Lage: Depending on when it came into the language?

May: Yes. And you even do see Japanese speakers making finger gestures
to show which character they mean of the syllable they're speaking.

55

I've sometimes thought it was as if the Chinese had conquered
medieval England and then given both Anglo-Saxon and Norman French
sounds to Chinese characters. It's an extraordinarily difficult
language, which explains why even now the Japanese are handicapped
when they are in foreign contact. Japanese is hard on the Japanese.

Lage : Even hard for the Japanese?

May: Yes. And it has something to do with the number of adolescent
suicides and something to do with the discipline of the society
because they have to work so hard.

Lage: Oh, isn't that interesting.

May: But anyway, we had a pretty good time: a test every Saturday morning
and a very good party every Saturday night. And we all had much
more money than we'd been used to having. Midway through the
program it was decided that we were to be commissioned --we'd been
yeoman second—so the May Company came out from Denver and fitted us
for uniforms.

We were still under the charge of chief petty officers, some
whom were pretty tough characters. We had an hour's compulsory
workout every day and some calisthenics first. And then what I did
usually was play soccer. We'd play with just a pair of shorts on in
the sun, with snow on the ground. It is a marvelous climate. We
also developed an interest in going around and looking at Colorado
ghost towns, which were very fascinating and at that time relatively
unexploited and undiscovered. So it was far from a bad fourteen
months .

Lage: It sounds like sort of a peaceful interlude?

May: It was a peaceful interlude, yes. But we knew, of course, it would
come to an end sometime. So then we all got sent to New York to
something with the unfortunate acronym ANIS.

Lage: [laughs] I wonder who came up with that.

May: A-N-I-S--Advanced Naval Intelligence School—which was in the Henry
Hudson Hotel. When we got there the officer in charge said, "Now,
you boys have been working pretty hard there in Boulder. Here you
are in New York and you're probably going overseas pretty soon"--in
other words, pretty much telling us not to take the program too
seriously. And indeed, it didn't deserve it. It was routine
intelligence stuff: photo recognition, lectures about possible
theaters of war taught by people who'd been in the navy. The real
idea was that they thought we'd be freaks and they wanted to get us
able to get along Dn ships with other ravy people.

56

Lage: They thought you'd be freaks because of the way you were selected?

May: Yes, and there were a lot of waivers for eyesight and so forth;

however, there were a few good college athletes. In Boulder it had
been a great day when our team in water polo, one of the roughest
sports there is, actually defeated the radio school, another unit
there. Actually, we were already—after the time in Colorado—in
good shape.

Jean and I spent plenty of time going to plays, nightclubs and
so forth. For instance, at that time, if you were in uniform and
went to the theater where Oklahoma ! was playing—that was the big
hit—if you said you were going overseas pretty soon, they'd sell
you a couple of tickets even though there were a lot of people
waiting. So we had a very good time in New York in that way.

But we knew the end was coming and that finally came. We were
by then living upstairs in the Henry Hudson Hotel, and saying
goodbye and going down in the elevator is I think possibly the
hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. And, of course,
getting on a train to go west.

Lage : And leaving Jean there .

May: Yes. She had a pretty good life going. She had a very pleasant
roommate and plenty of activities. But on the way west, somebody
asked, "Why, May, what are you doing here? You were supposed to go
to Washington!" So I got off the train in Omaha or somewhere and
called the commanding officer. And he said "Well, that was so, but
we couldn't get hold of you, so we won't change it now. Good luck,
May ! "

Lage: Just so casual!

May: I didn't tell Jean about that until some time afterward. So then
[June 1944] the next stop was Pearl Harbor, where by great good
fortune my brother, who was by this time in the navy in
communications, was also stationed. And pretty soon a person who
became a close friend— Leo Marx, who had been an undergraduate when
I was a tutor but I had known him in radical circles— turned up as a
commander of a sub chaser. Whenever we could, Leo and I spent
weekends together, exploring Oahu and talking about Harvard— and our
wives. So I had some friends there, a bit more.

But on the whole, the time in Pearl Harbor was not a good one.
The navy or, I think, military institutions that far behind the
lines, as that was by then, are full of intrigue and petty
careerism, for one thing. And the language officers were mostly in

57

a great big section called the Z section, which some called the Zoo
Section—translating captured documents.

Amphibious Group 12 and the Okinawa Operation

May: But by good luck, somebody who had known me, or known of me, at

Harvard was head of a small intelligence periodical that wanted one
language man, so I got moved down there with a great deal more
freedom and a great deal more interesting work. As I got onto it,
and since there wasn't much translation, gradually they let me try
writing pieces. I wrote pieces for this periodical—very useful
because you had to go fast, you couldn't hesitate—and re-read. If
you were told to come up with an article on Japanese radar, even if
you hardly knew what radar was, you talked to the people who knew
something about it, and did the best you could- -fast.

II

May: After a year I decided that I would like to see how I stood up in a
forward area. I wrote and got Jean's permission to try to make that
change, talked to a powerful officer, a captain in intelligence
who'd supervised the bulletin, and got myself transferred to be the
language man for Amphibious Group 12. That was getting ready for
the Okinawa campaign.

Lage: Tell me why you wanted to move into more active duty.

May: I didn't like it at Pearl and I think, also, I wanted to see whether
I'd gotten over early timidities enough to be able to take it, for
one thing. And I wanted to be in on what I thought was the big
experience for my generation, to put it pompously.

Lage: But you had that thinking at the time?

May: Yes. And it turned out that I was right— that is, I had a much
better time from then on to the end of my military service.

[Interview 3: July 2, 1998] II

Lage: Last time we had you transferring to the Amphibious Group 12 and
getting ready for Okinawa. So let's go on from there.

May: I was very happy to transfer from my desk job in Pearl Harbor to
Phib Group 12. This was a group of about a dozen officers and
enlisted men who had been together in the Battle of Britain and knew

58

each other very well. They were all from New England and they
accepted me right away as completely one of them.

It was fascinating to be in on the planning for the Okinawa
operation. Okinawa was out of bounds by Japanese military rules and
had been for quite a while, so practically nobody knew anything
about it. I did some research in the Honolulu public library,
[laughs] reading books that had been written a long time ago with
information that was obsolete. And we took along with us an elderly
man from Honolulu who was a shell collector—and this was voluntary,
he wasn't kidnaped or anything—and therefore had spent some time in
Okinawa.

Lage: Was he of Japanese descent?

May: No, American. He, like so many, had had a Japanese mistress when

he'd lived in Japan, who banked his money and treated him very well,
but he kept saying, "Why don't we wipe them all out?"

Lage: Oh, my!

May: I said, "But think of your girlfriend and all the other nice people
you knew." And he said, "Well, I might feel that way if I was
interested in people, but I'm not. I'm interested in shells." But
I'm well ahead of where I was because we did a lot of planning and
got to know each other, and then before we left, in very traditional
style, had a dinner with a lot of singing and so forth, naturally in
a Japanese restaurant. [laughs]

And then we got under way. On the ship I found that all the
traditions, and the rules, and vocabulary, and hierarchy of the
navy, which were just cumbersome and a nuisance on land, seemed to
make an awful lot more sense. Also, it was a common perception that
the same people who might be backbiting and selfish ashore at a desk
job, on a ship, especially moving toward a combat area, were just
ever so much more agreeable, unselfish. That was a very good part
of the experience. It was a long voyage, naturally, and the first
parts of it very pleasant going through islands in the South Pacific
and then the Central Pacific, where we stopped and I picked up
shells for Jean. So far there was always an officer's club with
drinks .

Then finally, we set out from the Philippines for Okinawa. And
as far as we could tell by radio and so forth, the Japanese didn't
know about where we were going, although they knew about the fleet,
of course. I was on a command ship, which is sort of a
communications center with an admiral's staff, and there were a lot
of transports and destroyer escorts. We went through a typhoon and

59

I think one of the little ships foundered. Anyway, they bounced up
and down an awful lot.

By the way, Okinawa is nominally a county of Japan and
nominally a part of it—then a rather oppressed part. As we got
nearer, they issued sheepskins and it began to get rather cold.
This was in April [1945]. Then finally we got there. And I
remember waking up to a tremendous din of gunfire from our ships and
the sight of the landing craft taking off in large numbers.

Lage: Did it appear to be a surprise, then? You'd think the Japanese
would have traced the progress of the fleet.

May: What was surprising was, considering where they had been, how far
out their perimeter had been. They had been preparing for about a
year for a possible attack on Okinawa, and when our people first
went ashore they found practically no resistance and were in three
hours where they were supposed to be in three days . Then they found
that further south there was a very well entrenched line with a lot
of underground fortifications and plenty of resistance. And they
were stuck there for a long time with an argument between the navy
and the marines. The marines wanted to go in and get it over fast,
and the navy and army were somewhat more deliberate.

In the meantime, we started getting kamikaze attacks every day,
sometimes more than once. And these were broadcast, usually calmly,
but once the man talking said, "Oh, my god, they're right overhead,"
everybody rushed to one side of the wardroom and [laughs] our
smallest machine guns started operating. We painted on our hull
after that half of a rising sun, the symbol meant we were half
responsible for shooting down an enemy plane.

My job was interviewing people that were hauled out of the
drink, and that was a fascinating job.

Lage: These kamikaze pilots?

May: Yes, sometimes not only on their first operational flight, but their
first flight. They had been to resorts with their parents and
friends to say goodbye, and they were urged by poems from school
girls, found on their persons, to dive bravely on an English or
American ship. They had tried to do so. The thing that prevented
them mostly was our putting up a dense fog so that some of them,
every now and then, came down- -having run out of fuel or for other
reasons — in the water and were hauled out alive. I also went
through the effects of some who were dead.

But then, when they had caught somebody, one of the ships that
had got him signaled to the command ship. And I was sent o t ;n a

60

small boat with one sailor to steer it to interview him. Once that
was rather scary because it was terribly foggy and at night and we
were in danger of being fired at--maybe we were a couple of times--
by our own ships. Once we couldn't find the ship I was supposed to
go to, so I came home thinking I'd be in bad trouble. The head of
the intelligence unit took me aside and gave me a quite illegal
drink of whiskey. That was really the kind of unit it was.

When I found these people, they would be in the brig of the
ship, not mistreated. I never saw any prisoner mistreated. I had
done some preparation in interrogating in prison camps in Hawaii.
Though I know that when the Japanese had the air power at
Guadalcanal and so forth some bad things happened. At this point
they were treated according to the rules. And this was easy enough
because they nearly all talked very freely. The Japanese doctrine
was that you absolutely did not surrender. They regarded themselves
as dead and would very often tell you details of ships they'd been
on, or of districts they'd lived in, or anything you wanted.

I was after one thing in these small-boat expeditions, and that
was to find out from which airport in Kyushu the plane had come
because that airport would obviously be paid a visit. So I had a
kit with a list of those airports. First you'd have to establish
the person's dignity—how he had tried to die hitting a ship but
then was picked up unconscious from the water—that sort of thing.

Lage: So you'd let him go through this kind of validating?

May: Yes. And I suppose, "And now, please have me killed." And, "Sorry,
that's contrary to our rules." "Well, then, may I have a
cigarette?" "Sure." They didn't really mean the former, I think--
or maybe they did, I'm not sure. Then they'd almost always open
right up and I'd say, "Well, how long did it take you to get down
here?" And they'd say, "Well, thirty minutes or something." And
I'd say, "Well, you must have come from this airport?" "No," they'd
say. "Then that one?" When I had it located, the interview was
essentially over.

Lage: And you felt it was an honest answer?

May: Oh, yes. The name of the airport was immediately sent back to Pearl
Harbor and the place would be bombed. I had absolutely no regrets
or stirrings of conscience against this sort of trickery because
after all they were sinking a lot of ships, more than had been sunk
in any Pacific battle so far, although Iwo Jima, which we learned
about on the way to Okinawa, had been bloodier in terms of
personnel.

61

So I had, let's say, reasonable employment. Then when things
quieted down, I went ashore and lived in a tent for a while. And
that was okay. Then unfortunately I had to leave my, by this time,
good friends in Phib Group 12 and was sent to a couple of other
ships. This was not an interesting enough experience to bother you
with, but I did learn to get along in the navy and did fairly well
to adapt to what it was like. One of the operations I was scheduled
to go on--a small island very near Japan- -was aborted. I was happy
about that. I would certainly have been on the invasion of Japan
had there been one.

Lage: Were you all expecting that that was going to be the next step?

May: Oh, yes. But I went back to Pearl Harbor and by this time I knew

enough—when there was no accommodation for me--to bribe an enlisted
man with a bottle of whiskey, which he couldn't get, and get him to
put me temporarily one place or another. Finally I got a more
permanent room with three southern ensigns, very young, who talked
about nothing but girls all the time. Really, this second period
was no good. I was back at work on the intelligence magazine that
I'd been on.

Lage: The same thing you'd been working on?
May: Yes.

Bombing of Hiroshima and the Occupation of Japan

May: Finally, of course, we got the news of Hiroshima.
Lage: How did people react to that, and you, in particular?

May: The main reaction was, "We're going to get home," though some of my
left-wing friends, because I certainly had them at Pearl Harbor,
said that we ought to turn over the bomb to the United Nations,
which, I think in retrospect, would not have been a good idea. But
the long-range implications—we didn't understand enough about it,
really.

Lage: Or even the power of the bomb probably wasn't fully understood? Or
was that well recorded?

May: I think it was, yes. So then the next thing was when the whole

apparatus at Pearl Harbor broke up and we were going to be sent to
Japan. And again, of course, it took a long time. We were in the
Philippines for a while—Manila utterly smashed up by the Japanese--

62

and then finally went to Japan. Actually, there was another
typhoon.

Our convoy finally came to a small place called Waka-no-ura,
near Wakayama. The early occupation was immensely fascinating.
Since the emperor had given them orders and told them to obey
MacArthur, they were remarkably cordial. When I first went ashore
and it was found 1 could speak some Japanese, 1 had all sorts of
little school children hanging onto my uniform saying, "What's that,
what's that," about the ships and all that. Once in a while you'd
meet a die-hard but not often.

I established social relations with a young man in the village.
I'd go to his house and he'd give me tea and tangerines, which was
all he had, and we'd talk about various things. Then eventually I
got sent overland to help prepare for the occupation of Nagoya with
two other navy people. On the road little boys would yell, "Hello
Joe," and ask for candy and so forth. And then we were in Nagoya
getting it ready for troops to come.

Lage: Was your role again in translation?

May: Yes, including setting up, I'm sorry to say, a district called the
Bright Pleasure Garden- -something like that.

Lage: This was official?

May: Yes, it was official prostitution, which really didn't have the same
connotations and stigma as in the West, and was remarkably
successful in preventing incidents and so forth. In the early
occupation, each side had heard propaganda about the horrors of the
other side and each side was remarkably favorably surprised. I
heard that from later talking to Japanese in Japan. Later, of
course, things weren't quite that nice, but I think it was the most
successful occupation of a major defeated enemy that I know about.

I don't think I'll go into a travelogue, but I was able to get
around Japan quite a bit. In those days, towns and cities were
almost all smashed absolutely flat and burnt to the ground. The
countryside was remarkably beautiful, not yet polluted and very
rural. I traveled a certain amount by train around and then finally
was stuck in a translation section in Tokyo Harbor, right near one
of the Japanese battleships that had been reported sunk, but on a
small craft--! don't remember exactly what variety. People were
going ashore and interviewing various ministries and so forth. Not
nearly the excitement of earlier duty. And I began to get even more
homesick.

Lage: Were you still writing daily letters?

63

May: Yes. On the way up there, every now and then somebody was sent
home. There was a point system for how long they'd been there,
whether you'd been in combat, and that sort of thing. But the
language men were outside of it.

Lage: Yes, they needed you.

May: Well, they thought they did. It turned out not. But on the way to
Japan we had these shipside ceremonies where a little band would
play "Sentimental Journey" and "It's Been a Long, Long Time" and
people would be very envious of the guy that was going, but one of
the officers would say, "Well, it's not so bad! Look at Henry-
excuse me, Henry—you'll probably be patrolling the streets of Tokyo
for ten years!"

Lage: Oh, [laughter] you must have been getting a little discouraged.

May: Yes. However, fortunately, General MacArthur decided that he didn't
want the navy Caucasian language men, he wanted to rely on Nisei
sergeants, and so gradually people were being sent home.

Lage: Do you know what he was thinking there? He thought it would be
better relations?

May: Probably better Japanese. And he was probably right! [laughter]
And though not necessarily better written Japanese, certainly much
better spoken. Needless to say, some know the language wonderfully
well and others not.

IV RETURN TO ACADEMIA AND POSTWAR ADJUSTMENTS

Return from Tour of Duty

May: Then, while we were still off Tokyo, I got a cable from my brother
saying that my mother's cancer, which she had had before, was
spreading and I should come home as soon as I can. That got me an
emergency leave and I went back to Berkeley. Jean, who by that time
had got the word, was out staying with my mother. So I came back
with of course immense pleasure at reunion with Jean, but with this
sadness mixed in with it. Pretty soon I learned that I would not
have to go back, which was a great relief. 1 mean, I was through
with the navy.

Lage: How long did your mother live after that?

May: Let's see, that was about Thanksgiving in '45 and she died in late
spring of '46. She was extremely courageous about it, quite
remarkably so. But Jean and I after a while got the great break of
a wonderful apartment on Macrondray Lane on the slopes of Russian
Hill in North Beach. We'd lived in that region briefly before the
war while I was waiting to go overseas, also.

Lage: Apartments were not easy to find.

May: They were not. This was through somebody we knew. And for a while
we were awfully rich because payments kept coming in that I didn't
know I was entitled to from the navy for being in one place or
another. I forgot to say--I think I'll put in this because it meant
something to me—when I got back to Pearl Harbor I found that I had
a commendation ribbon for the work in Okinawa and Pearl Harbor.

65
Completion of Dissertation

May: While we were living there and eating in the best restaurants, I was
working on my thesis. I think I mentioned to you that I had
actually considered changing my field.

Lage: Let's talk about that.

May: All right. Well, while I was at Boulder in language school I'd sent
a chunk of my dissertation to Mr. Schlesinger and it had arrived
back with no comment except on punctuation. And that irritated me
so much under the circumstances that I was very disaffected.

Lage: Well, did this mean that he thought it was pretty well perfect?

May: No. It was just his way. [laughter] That is, I'd rather have had
serious criticisms—he was a nice man but a little stiff in manner,
more than he meant to be--and that irritated me and made me
disaffected. Also, I was terribly interested in the Far East.
Actually a large number of the American Japanese and Chinese experts
came out of the navy and army training and I knew a number of them,
so it would have been feasible. I considered trying to stay in
Japan and bringing Jean over, but when I got back I found I had two
fellowships offering me almost full support.

Lage: Right in this immediate postwar period?

May: Yes, because of friends at Harvard.

Lage: Were these fellowships to continue with your dissertation?

May: Yes, so I got out my cold notes and went on with it. While we were
living in San Francisco, on account of my mother, I was working on
my thesis for Harvard. In this apartment we had two typewriters. I
would be typing on one, finishing up one chapter, and Jean would be
typing the other, back to back more or less. And we got it done.

Lage: It must have been kind of an adjustment after what you'd been
through?

May: It was. Sure, which everybody went through. I was active at that

time in the North Beach chapter of the American Veteran's Committee,
a liberal group whose slogan was, "Citizens first, veterans second."
And they obviously were in competition with the Legion and the VFW
[Veterans of Foreign Wars]. They got more or less nowhere, but
there was intense argument between the right and left wing and that
was another diversion. But except for my mother's illness, this was
an okay time.

66

Lage: You taught a semester at Berkeley?
May: Yes, after the death of my mother.
Lage: After the death of your mother in the fall?

May: In the spring of '46, yes. As I have said, she died very

heroically, saying a special goodbye to each one of us. Shortly
after her death I was still in uniform and was invited to dinner at
the house of some Berkeley ladies who were friends of my mother.
Professor John Hicks of Berkeley was there, too, and he said, "By
the way, we've got a temporary vacancy and if you're interested go
and see Professor Paxson, chairman of the department." I didn't
really know whether I was interested or not, but I did finally go
see him, finding him surprised that I'd taken so long. He offered
me the job, so I lectured in the elementary course- -in two sections
of it--not terribly well. Pretty stiff as a lecturer still.

Lage: Did you get out your old notes?

May: Yes.

Lage: From your previous teaching?

May: Well, I worked very hard on bringing lectures up to date. Then

Professor Larry Harper, who had known me as an undergraduate, told
me how to go up to the Faculty Club more and mix with people more,
which indicated that they were somewhat interested in possibly
appointing me later. And there were other such indications.

So eventually I got the dissertation done. And my attitude in
writing it all along was, "Well, I don't care if Schlesinger or
anybody else likes it or not, I'm going to do it the way I want to
do it." So we went back to Cambridge where we were greeted by Jack
Rackliffe and other Harvard friends and lived in the apartment of my
very good friend, Leo Marx.

II

May: We lived in the Marxes' apartment on what was well known to be the
wrong side of Beacon Hill. There was a drunken woman upstairs that
screamed every night, and there were plenty of cockroaches, but we
were awfully glad to have the apartment. Leo and I were happy to
meet each other's wives, who became and have been ever since close
friends, particularly in the next few years.

I went to see Mr. Schlesinger and he greeted me and we talked
about this and that and I said, "Mr. Schlesinger, did you get my

67

thesis?" He said, "You didn't get my letter? Everything was Just
fine."

Lage: [laughs] Still no criticisml Of course you didn't want it at this
point.

May: Well, then I had to take the special examination, which in the

Harvard program comes after the thesis. They can ask you questions
on anything in your field and this was very scary to me. It took
place in Mr. Schlesinger' s garden with Perry Miller, Mr.
Schlesinger, and Richard Leopold, a young assistant professor of
American diplomatic history. I passed okay, but not as well as my
friends would have liked.

Lage: Was that out of the ordinary to have the exam at that point?
May: No. That was part of the rule.

Lage: I mean, was it at other universities than Harvard? Or was this the
standard?

May: I don't think so, not a serious one. It was a little more serious
for me because I'd been excused from earlier orals and also hadn't
had the practice of it.

So then we went up to Kittery in Maine to the house of F. 0.
Matthiessen, which he had lent to the Marxes. Had a wonderful time
there eating lobster and fishing for flounder and so forth. And
then we went back to California.

Scripps College and Family Life in Claremont. California. 1947-1952

May: Before I went back to Cambridge, I had an offer of a job at Scripps
College in southern California. I wasn't too eager to be in
southern California, and I wasn't too eager to teach at a girl's
college, but you didn't turn down jobs. After I had accepted this
job, we'd both been down and liked, rather, Frederick Hard, the
president, and had been shown around this very, very pretty campus.

I got an inquiry from Berkeley as to whether I would accept an
assistant professorship there. They assumed of course I would, but
I asked Mr. Schlesinger and he said if you break your agreements
this way you get a bad name, so I told them, No, I was sorry, I
couldn't just then, and went down to Claremont.

Lage: What were your feelings about that?

68

May: Oh, a certain amount of regret, but actually I went to Claremont as
an assistant professor, and in a few years was promoted to associate
professor.

Lage: Associate professor?

May: Yes. The reason for that was that I had published a book manuscript
in the religious department of Harper's. That meant a great deal in
terms of getting jobs. I'll talk about that in a minute about the
book when it comes out.

Lage: So the book was accepted almost immediately?

May: Well, not as immediately as I've made it sound, but within a few
months .

Lage: Soon enough to get promoted at Scripps?

May: Yes. But I think it also affected the inquiry from Berkeley.

Lage: How did the inquiries come from Berkeley? From the chairman of the
department?

May: Yes.

Lage: Was that still Hicks?

May: No, Van Nostrand, I think.

But let me talk for a minute about the Claremont Colleges.
There were, at that time Pomona, Claremont Men's College, Claremont
Graduate School, and Scripps in a sort of loose federation, called
by the official Pomona handbook "The Oxford of the Orange Belt."
Claremont was regarded in a rather snobbish way as an oasis in the
desert of industrial southern California.

It was a nice little town, only 3,500 at that time and no smog
yet, and the colleges were good colleges. This meant that the
social life was much better than it would have been if it had only
been Scripps faculty. There were only 225 girls at Scripps, so it
was a small but rather interesting faculty. The faculty at Scripps
was absolutely first rate in the arts, and I would be amazed at
seeing at an exhibit how well one of the girls had done who had
amounted to nothing in particular in my American history classes.

But we were contented there, had some very good friends—at
least one of whom was a friend for life. Others were friends for a
long time. We, at first, had an absolutely dreadful little shack

69

for a house, then quite a decent little house with a yard and so
forth and oleander trees. These were happy years.

Among my friends that I mention in my book was Golo Mann, who
taught at Claremont Men's College. He was one of the sons of Thomas
Mann, then living at Pacific Palisades. He was a very interesting
man, my first experience of a European conservative—very different
from an American reactionary, somebody who did not believe in the
perfectibility of man or in progress, a stance which was rather a
shock to most Americans. He and Robert Palmer in classics and I
used to hike a lot in the mountains above San Bernardino. By
driving and walking a few miles, you get up quickly to six, seven
thousand feet, with wonderful views of the desert. So these were
good years.

One of the results of these good years was that Jean got
pregnant, which we had wanted for a long time. There were certain
reasons why not, and we had been engaged in quite seriously trying
to adopt a child by that time, and as so often happens she found she
was pregnant. Then a couple years later we thought it would be much
better for our daughter Hildegarde--later always Hildy--to have a
sister or a brother, so we set about adopting again; she got
pregnant again.

Lage: Two daughters?

May: Two daughters were born, not exactly in Claremont--Hildy was, but
Ann while we were on a year's visit from Claremont in this period.
I was officially at Scripps for five years.

Lage: Now what was your role as a father and as a struggling young
professor? Did they go together?

May: I certainly took fatherhood seriously, but for then and later Jean
did most of the work, as faculty wives usually did, because they
didn't usually work any other way. They didn't usually have, that
is, money-making work. But I did my best and was always very much
interested, at least. Fortunately, because I was ambitious, I knew
that angels were watching me up in the sky at Harvard. I had
several suggestions of jobs that I didn't really want.

Lage: People would let you know that there were openings?

May: Yes, at least I didn't think I'd be in Claremont all the rest of my
life, that is.

Lage: And you wouldn't have been happy to be there, it seems from what you
have said.

70

May: No, it was a very contented time, but I wanted to be at a place that
was a little more intellectually excising- -not that the people there
weren't bright—but where serious research and writing was taken for
granted rather than done by some people.

Lage: It sounds like a very different atmosphere from Lawrence, though.

May: Oh, much better, yes. And while some friends wanted to try to get
me back to Lawrence I didn't want to go. The Scripps president,
Frederick Hard, was a nice man. Again, the town was supposed to be
dry, and we got in there the first time very, very early in the
morning. And when 1 asked, "Where's there a liquor store?" we got,
"Not in Claremont, though those folks up at the colleges certainly
get it somewhere." And when we first went to the Hards' they served
us sherry. We ordered our liquor from a place right outside of the
town and there was no tension about that kind of stuff, and really
very little tension about anything, with the good and the bad
results of that.

Lage: Did the town have an economic base? Was it farming, basically, or
ranching?

May: No, oranges. At that time there were oranges all around so that in
the winter they'd light their fires and burn oil. Heavy black smoke
would descend over the town and the colleges had to get all their
sheets cleaned and our little girls would have little black noses.

An important thing about our life there was that we didn't have
a car. We took taxis, which were about thirty- five cents anywhere
in town.

Lage: Was that unusual?

May: Very. But that's what we did.

Lage: But they did have taxis after all.

May: Yes.

Lage: Let's go back. I've been interviewing another academic from the
very same era as you. It's the first time I've asked a man if he
changed diapers, and he never had!

May: I see. Really?

Lage: You know, very much a family man.

May: Well, I certainly did, regularly. Most people on generally liberal
principles in the academic world were sort jf vaguely feminists,

71

certainly didn't regard women as inferior, but it's still true women
did most of the work at home.

Lage: You say that most of the faculty wives did not work outside the
home. Was that kind of disapproved of?

May: No, there were even a couple of women faculty members, it just

wasn't the custom. I really think that's how it was. People were
very wrapped up in their husband's jobs. That is, Jean and I would
make fun of people who said, "When we were doing our dissertation,"
and that kind of thing, but we had worked together in a way on mine.

Publication and Reception of First Book

May: Now, the other thing that happened there was the publication of my

first book. My first book came out in '49, so obviously I turned it
in to the publisher in '48.

Lage: You mentioned it was published by a religious division of Harper's,
but it was a very academic book.1

May: Yes, that's right. Oh, yes. And the book broke some new ground. I
had spent very long hours while I was in Cambridge in the basement
of various libraries, theological and divinity schools, including
Harvard's, but around the East, really going through religious
weeklies. Religious weeklies in the nineteenth century were very
important, had large circulations, and influenced people a lot. I
went through them week by week, which is pretty strenuous. Of
course, at that time there was no Xerox; you had to copy things out.
And I got the industrial disease of dust in my nose and throat from
these papers that had not been opened much.

In the book, among other things, I traced the change in the
thinking of urban American clergy on social questions which
concentrated around three violent episodes. The history of American
labor is extremely violent in the nineteenth century, more so in
ways than European labor because American labor had a hard time
getting organized at all and was not generally socialist, although
it was industrial.

Strikes were particular and for very good reasons, usually, and
the employers completely ruthless. The general belief in academic

'Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1949/.

72

circles, many of which were clerically influenced, was that striking
was not only evil but worthless because they believed in the wage-
fund theory: that there was only a certain amount to pay wages and
if the workers got too much of this then the industries would close
down. So the general advice was to stay very quiet and save your
money, and eventually you'll get rich—and above all, avoid drink.
The literalness of this is you'd have to see to believe.

Lage: Now did this message come out of the religious weeklies?

May: Well, out of that and many other sources—an awful lot of books,
too. I worked very hard on this book.

Lage: Did you find things as you were researching that you didn't expect
to find?

May: Oh, yes!

Lage: You just started reading and then from that came--

May: Yes, well, that's always been my practice. I think that historians,
as opposed to social scientists, make their questions out of their
research rather than having them before. What struck me was the
immense impact of these three great crises: the railroad strikes of
1877, when flaming box cars were sent in to roundhouses and parts of
cities burnt up and weapons used on both sides and so forth; then in
1886 the Haymarket bombing and the violent reaction to that and
another series of heartfelt strikes; and then finally, from '92 to
'94, the Homestead and Pullman strike when actually artillery was
used. These were very violent episodes.

The clergy reaction to them was at first pretty definite. I'll
read a quotation that was a quote picked up by Richard Hofstader in
a book and has been used several times. This is the Independent , a
theologically liberal congregational weekly: "A mob should be
quashed by knocking down or shooting down the men engaged in it and
the more promptly this is done the better. When anarchy gathers its
deluded disciples into a mob, as at Chicago, a Catling gun or two
swiftly brought into position and well served offers on the whole
the most merciful as well as effectual remedy." And a little later,
"To talk about pity, sympathy or delight in connection with such
demons is to encourage their kind. To speak of their offenses as
political is to hide their character and to engender the sentiment
which breeds them." [From page 100 of Protestant Churches.]

Well, as the period went on, more and more fervent clergymen
decided that this wasn't quite enough and that there must be
something the matter with the doctrines of laissez-faire that
everybody believed in. They started dissenting on particular

73

matters so that by the mid-nineties, where I ended, the articulate
and urban parts of the churches were liberal. They adhered to the
doctrines called the Social Gospel--a reinterpretation of the
doctrines of Jesus in social terms to one degree or another.

There was a long and complicated transition affected by a
number of other things, too. I'm of course simplifying it a lot.
When this book came out, it was universally very well reviewed.
It's the most conventional of my books by far, and so for that
reason, got almost unanimous good reviews, [laughs] more than any of
my later books.

Lage: In what way is it more conventional?

May: Well, it follows implicitly, I'd say, an economic interpretation of
events. That is, I talk about doctrines, but it's the social facts
that produce them, and it sort of has one thing after another. To
answer why it's more conventional I'll have to say why the other
books were less so.

Lage: So we'll get to that?

May: Yes. But anyway it did me a great deal of professional good and it
was reprinted several times and was my main professional stock in
trade, so to speak, for a while thereafter. I wrote a few articles,
but the book led to Berkeley's renewed interest.

Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, 1949

May: Now, while we were in Claremont, we were invited twice to go away--
the first time, in the summer of '49, to the Salzburg seminar in
American Studies, and that was a truly thrilling experience. This
was before Ann was born, so we left Hildy with Jean's mother,
grandmother, and grandfather in Portland. We traveled first to
Paris where Jean had never been. It had always been my favorite
place, that is, since I was there as a kid. And we went to Venice,
which was pretty exciting, and traveled about.

And then we got to Salzburg, an immensely beautiful baroque city
with no war damage. We lived in this very elaborate rococo castle
which had belonged to the playwright Max Reinhardt, a castle originally
of the archbishop of Salzburg, who was a feudal magnate. It had
frescoed ceilings and gilt walls and the works, also a small lake.

The Salzburg seminar had been organized the year before by
Harvard undergraduates wanting to bring back ties with young

74

Europeans. I was asked the first year--1948--through the efforts of
Leo Marx and Henry Smith, but after a struggle decided not to go
because that was the year I was editing my book for publication and
I thought I better do that. But then I was asked the second year.

Lage: So this was the very second year that the seminar was held?

May: Yes, that's right.

Lage: Who were the students? Were they Harvard undergraduates?

May: No, the students were Europeans coming together to study American

studies. They were selected from all countries of Europe that could
be reached. They had a few from East bloc countries the first time.
The only one that we got, not from lack of trying, was a young Czech
musician and there was somebody there with him to watch him. But
from every other country, from Scandinavia to Italy. And in
addition to not having studied about American issues, arts and so
forth, they had not met people from all these other countries,
particularly, of course, people who'd been on different sides of the
war. You had Austrians and Germans there as well as French, Dutch,
and Scandinavians. Among the Scandinavians there was tensions
between the others and the Swedes, who'd been neutral.

But they all got along very well and were tremendously lively.
For instance, they learned to play baseball, and they also were
taught by somebody to make apple pie beds. And they made apple pie
beds for each other with the greatest of will, and were very good
company. I was not so much older and meeting them was extremely
exciting.

The faculty was a first-rate faculty. I was the youngest and
the least prestigious of the people there. My colleague, Dexter
Perkins, a senior American historian, shared the American history
with me. He was a delightful man and terribly considerate of my
feelings as his equal colleague. An extremely well-known pacifist
economist, Kenneth Boulding, was there.

I*

Lage: How many faculty were there?

May: I would think about eight--! haven't counted them—and then graduate
assistants. The Harvard undergraduates were an extremely lively
bunch, some of whom—one couple- -became very close friends.

Lage: What was the attitude of the students? I'm asking this because I
happened to look at John Hicks ' memoir and he was there the next
year after you, 1950.

75

May: Is that sol

Lage: The main comment he made was that the students were extremely
critical of the United States, didn't trust the Marshall Plan.

May: The students on the whole were of the left, but so, of course, was
I. Mostly they were to one or another degree what we call liberal
ranging toward socialist. We all lived there, of course, very
happily, talking with each other all of the time about all sorts of
issues—critical of the United States, yes, but immensely
interested. And of the students there, a number went on to be
absolutely first-rate academics and a number into politics. There
were any number of distinguished careers that came out of there .

This is an example: Austria was still under occupation, and we
went to- -let's see, 1 forget to what town, not Vienna, which was in
the Russian zone and not too easily approachable, but you could go
there—and were entertained by the American military, who were
distinctly suspicious of the seminar, particularly of F. 0.
Matthiessen, who'd been there that first year. We met the French
and Russian attaches and then invited the officers back. And the
students immediately got the idea. To our great surprise, they came
to dinner wearing coats and ties and were very respectful and
polite. That is, they knew that we needed military tolerance; it
was very good communication, in other words. I remember that while
we served wine, as usual and plenty of it, somebody stood behind the
general's chair and poured whiskey. [laughter] But it all went off
okay.

Lage: So it was a little bit of public relations?

May: Yes. Sitting on the steps by the lake, we had wonderful

discussions — faculty, assistants, and students. And it was, as I
say, interesting to see the former enemies associate. There was a
handsome, young, blond Austrian, who looked like everybody's idea of
a Nazi, who said, "We must force people to be tolerant!" [laughter]
I made some acquaintances who were later correspondents.

I'll come to how this affected my changing political attitudes,
but it was, as you can see, a fascinating and exciting experience,
all the more because it was so improvised in those days. For
instance, the students who were running it hadn't really gotten an
adequate way to get home, so they had to send us by first class on a
Canadian ship to Montreal. Here we were, coming aboard in this very
handsome suite, with our luggage consisting of a typewriter in a
knapsack and various things like that and no clothes more formal
than a tweed jacket and gray flannel pants. Everybody else dressed
for dinner. The person who had the suite next to us was Lady Megan
Lloyd George, going to an imjerr'al conference. So people, I think,

76

got the idea that we were some kind of eccentrics. The stewards all
managed to conceal their rather extreme reactions. By not going to
the bar, we saved enough money to tip them as they were supposed to
be tipped on the last day.

But that's an example of the early haphazard seminar, which
Dexter Perkins as chairman took over and reorganized. It became
more orderly from then on. But I think that it was exciting in the
early period.

Lage: How was it financed?

May: By contributions.

Lage: Sounds like a wonderful seminar.

May: That was a great experience.

Lage: Did Jean get to take part? Did the faculty wives get in on
discussions?

May: Oh, yes, indeed. Enormously. And on the dances and so forth. Most
of us seemed something more or less of an age--the students and the
assistants and Jean and me.

Then we went back and picked up the kids, which was difficult
because Jean's family had gotten very attached to them. Or should I
say, picked up Hildy.

Lage: Yes, just one at that point.

May: Yes, it was one at that time. We went back to Claremont and to our
surprise didn't mind being back in Claremont after all that glamour.

Visiting Faculty at Bowdoin College. 1950-1951

May: Then, in 1950, we went for a year to Bowdoin College in Maine, near
where Jean's family was. That was an interesting experience because
Bowdoin at that time was under only the second president that it had
had since the 1880s and was a very traditional college. In fact, I
thought it gave me some insight into what American colleges had been
like, not so much in the late as in the early nineteenth century- -
with compulsory daily chapel, for instance, which the students would
ask to have withdrawn but the alumni always insisted on. Actually,
chapel was extremely nonsectarian and was a rather good way to get
the college together and talk about various things, including at

77

that time the Korean War, which the students were very worried
about .

The main thing people did through that winter was square
dancing. There was a rage for it and we did it a couple of times a
week. Brunswick, Maine is a very pretty place with a lot of
attractive villages around it. We had a very nice house, replacing
a distinguished faculty member, Edward Chase Kirkland. The house
was fussily furnished and really no place for children. Ann was
born in Portland Hospital while we were there.

Lage: How did that offer come? You couldn't have been further from
Claremont !

May: No, it didn't really have anything to do with Jean's family, though
her grandfather had some association with the college. It was the
suggestion of the man whom I replaced.

Lage: I see.

Move Away from Identification with Communism

May: I was going to review my political thinking for some time back. As
I told you, I was pretty radical--! would say a fellow traveler—in
Cambridge. That didn't particularly change in my overseas period.
I didn't talk politics, but radicals and particularly Communists
more than anybody else believed in winning the war, so there wasn't
much friction about that anyway. For some reason people in the
Pacific theater came out of the war rather more radicalized than
people in the European theater, in my experience.

Lage: Do you have an explanation?

May: Well, I think possibly because they were more isolated from

politics, whereas people in Europe experienced a politics they could
understand more seriously, but I'm not sure. And there were plenty
of radicals from the European campaigns, too.

But in Claremont, then, I came back still pretty radical and
shifted away from the far left position rather later than many
people who shifted did. In Claremont I took part in the [Henry]
Wallace [presidential] campaign [1948], and it was enormously to the
credit of the president of Scripps that I was protected and never
experienced any unpleasantness, because I made some public lectures
and there were people from the Crusaders and other such southern
California groups always taking notes. I never h. d . ny personal

78

flak, but it was impossible for me anyway to look at the Wallace
campaign seriously and not know it was run by the Communist party.

Also, another thing that influenced me was correspondence from
a student at Salzburg, an Austrian who was a socialist, who
seriously was worried about a Russian incursion and thought if we
were not pretty tough in the Far East that that was going to happen.
That is, that somebody I trusted, that I knew, that was a socialist
that felt that way was educational to me, too.

Lage: When you say that it was easy for you to see that the Wallace

campaign was directed or infiltrated by Communists, was it easy for
everyone, or was it because of your background?

May: Most people, I think, by the end of it recognized certain crucial
changes in line that occurred during it. And I don't mean to say
that everybody who was for Wallace was a Communist or necessarily
even directly influenced by them. F. 0. Matthiessen gave one of the
nominating speeches. The general position was that any postwar
trouble with Russia was our fault and we ought to do very
differently, which I was willing to try to believe. But it became
less and less plausible and the fact that I was not in the least
bothered made it harder to feel like a martyr, probably.

So I began distinctly before the end of my time in Claremont to
move away from the far left.

Lage: Were events in Europe, the iron curtain and all of that, affecting
your point of view?

May: Oh, sure. Oh, yes. And I was reading them somewhat differently.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1948, for instance, was important,
and a number of other issues. I don't need to go into all that, I
think, because this is very familiar for so many people who changed.
I tried not to change too far. And then what's next?

Lage: You've written about the changes in your religious beliefs.

May: It didn't happen yet. I still regarded myself, I would say, as an
agnostic. And that was another reason for not being able ever
completely to go along with the Communists. I found I couldn't be a
systematic materialist, as of course you are supposed to be, though
not all of them were. A thought about that: these days there are
two interpretations of the American Communist party of those years.
It's very easy to demonstrate that the party followed the changes in
the Moscow line slavishly. In fact, recent documents that are now

79

available show exactly how much money was spent by the Soviet Union
and that kind of thing.

However, there's another school that points out that there were
Communists who on a local level and in particular issues were in
some very good causes. For instance, there were Communists in
Alabama, absolutely biracial, in their work. And to be a Communist
in Alabama, whatever else you thought about it, certainly took guts.
They were in all sorts of causes like the Scottsboro boys and so
forth, many of which they perverted and changed to their own uses.
But I say both interpretations are true: that the American Communist
party, was absolutely loyal to every shift of opinion in Moscow,
more so than the European parties because it had less of a real
base. But also I know that there were some excellent and absolutely
sincere and honorable and hardworking people in it.

Lage: Who maybe didn't have another form of expressing those views?

May: Well, I've explained what I thought the attraction was: the demand
for complete, self-denying allegiance was what was attractive to
some temperaments. But the attraction was abating.

Recruitment by UC Berkeley

May: I think now I'll get to Cal's renewing its interest seriously.
While I was at Bowdoin, I got a letter from the chairman of the
[Berkeley] department approaching me for an assistant, maybe
associate professor. I didn't accept that because of the loyalty
oath controversy at that time. I wrote a letter saying I didn't
criticize what anybody else did at all, but I couldn't accept it. I
felt that mainly it was how my friends would have looked at it. You
know a good deal, I'm sure, about the loyalty oath and all that.

Lage: Yes. Again, we know it from within, the view from Berkeley, but it
sounds as if the professoriate across the country were watching?

May: Oh, they were. Cal was under censure from the AAUP [American
Association of University Professors] and much denounced.

Lage: It would have been a major statement almost?

May: Well, for me to go there would have been saying I didn't believe

everything I'd been saying for a long time. I mean, I couldn't do
it. Then, when I was on the way back from Bowdoin, teaching summer
session at Minnesota, where Henry Smith and Leo Marx had gotten me a
summer job, I got approached again because the oath had beer, thrown

80

out by the courts. Instead, faculty had to sign the Levering Act
oath, whose great virtue was that all the state employees had to
sign it. Well, I wondered about that at the time, whether you could
call that exactly a victory, to extend an--I think—just about
equally disagreeable oath to all the state employees. But all the
non-signers had come back. I certainly didn't hold out after that
and accepted with great delight.

Lage: Who made you that offer and how did it get extended?

May: Hicks again. He came by and met me and came to our house in
Claremont. Oh, an amusing thing: Mr. Schlesinger was giving
lectures in Claremont and came to our house and was terribly genial.
I remember his holding Hildy on his lap and so forth. And 1 asked
him, "Tell me, when you're giving public lecture like this, are you
nervous at all?" And he said, "Oh, no, Henry, because it's very
unlikely that anybody in our profession will talk to a hostile
audience." And that was a clouded crystal ball. [laughter] A few
years later, the opposite was true.

But anyway, I was overjoyed to get invited back to Berkeley.
One detail I mention in the book that I think is rather funny: we
did not have a car. Jean had driven in the past but I hardly had,
for various reasons. Partly because my older brother tried to teach
me. I knew enough—that is, how the thing ran. But I didn't have
much practice, so we hired a Claremont graduate student to give us
driving lessons— f irst out in the country and then in the scary
traffic hub of the small town of Claremont. We learned okay and
passed our exams and set out to go up to Berkeley with the two
children— all on back roads and taking, if you can believe it, four
days. [laughter]

Lage: Was this to avoid the traffic?

May: Yes. [laughter] We had a wonderful time doing that and my sister
in Berkeley had found us the house that we're talking in now.

Lage: Oh! You moved right to this house?

May: Yes, we rented it then. It didn't look at all the way it does now.
It's been very much remodeled, but we came here.

Lage: And you came as an associate professor?

May: I came as an associate professor— in fact, a middle-rank associate
professor, which was a wonderful thing because sweating out
promotion to tenure at Berkeley is a terrible experience. And I
missed it, just as I missed the orals experience at Harvard.

81

The first time I went to the Berkeley campus, Mrs. Radke, then
the one department secretary (instead of the big staff we have now),
said, "Welcome home, Mr. May." I was really very moved—all the
more so when I walked up to the Faculty Club and the carillon was
playing Cal football songs. I really felt that I had come home,
although we lived five miles from where I was brought up, in an
entirely different part of the town, and had only a few friends
carried over from earlier periods in Berkeley and San Francisco.

Lage: Okay, that's a nice place to stop.

82

V UC BERKELEY IN THE FIFTIES: HISTORY DEPARTMENT FACULTY AND
PUBLICATIONS

[Interview 4: July 16, 1998] it

Lage: So we got you to Berkeley last week. We talked about the trip and
the welcome and now we want to talk about your first years and how
you acclimated.

May: Well, I was thrilled to be in Berkeley. It was home, for one thing,
but also to be in a major university instead of college—a
completely different atmosphere, completely different emphasis. And
I loved my main job which was to introduce American intellectual
history at Berkeley, where it had not been taught.

Lage: [laughs] Did somebody encourage you in that direction, or did you
see it as your main job?

May: No, that was what I was hired for.

Lage: Who set up those parameters? What professors said, "Come and
introduce American intellectual history?"

May: John Hicks. He was chairman and a very strong chairman. I worked
very hard at this, and there's no job anywhere in the world that I
could have enjoyed more. I got bright students, including quite a
few who knew something about the history of European thought but had
no idea how rich the American past was. Also, from the start I was
on many committees because people thought I might be neutral in the
battles that were already beginning in the department. This turned
out to be a wrong guess.

Adjustments to New Location and Standard of Living

May: However, the change from Claremont to Berkeley was less good for

Jean. She had had a peaceful life. We had had r,\any friends. And

83

it took a while to adjust. And even though I got a considerably
higher salary, we were very poor because the expenses were so much
greater.

Lage: Was housing expensive?

May: Comparatively and also we had to have a car. We didn't have a car

in Claremont--had taken taxis here and there. And it was compulsory
that newcomers be entertained by everybody in the department and
then invite them back, and that meant fairly elaborate dinner
parties with plenty to drink, which is expensive.

Lage: Had that been a tradition at Scripps?

May: No. Well, we had parties, yes, but at Scripps there weren't

departments and at Pomona there were, I think, three people in
history.

Lage: And there wasn't the sense that this kind of entertaining was
something you had to do?

May: No, and it was done more simply anyway. So at that time, to make it
more poignant, by the end of the month we couldn't shop anywhere
except at the grocery store where we charged things. And quite
often I had to go down to a bank and borrow fifty or one hundred
dollars to tide us over.

Lage: My goodness! Didn't the professors understand what a scrimped
salary you were on?

May: Well, we were all pretty poor. I remember my friends in Claremont
said, "Well, maybe they'll offer you $6,000 or something like that
and then you'll have to go!" Well, I had got more than that to
start with, but not an awful lot more. And of course the bank was
very glad to lend the money because the interest rates that they got
for such short loans were very high and because our credit and the
credit of all faculty members had to be good.

Also, I had less time for the children than I had had. I was
under pressure to write as well as teach and be on committees.
Though I always had some time. The best times we had were on mini-
vacations--three or four days when we'd start out in the car, often
in the evening, with the children in the back wrapped in blankets,
not know where we were going and end somewhere in the foothills of
the Sierras or something like that. We always had a good time.

Lage: Oh, that must have been nice.

84

May: And our girls remember it happily. I continued to be hard-pressed
financially—gradually, less so—for about the first ten years.

Lage : Did salaries jump or was this a result of promotions?

May: No, they jumped. They went steadily up and quite drastically by the
end of the fifties.

Lage: Relative to other segments of society, did professors' salaries go
up, do you think?

May: Yes, but we still were not as nearly as well off as doctors and
lawyers, let's say.

Relationships with Faculty Members

May: About the other members of the department and my relations with
them, I must admit that there were a good many who were not
particularly congenial, who had been there for a long time, and had
different views than I had. And I gradually learned some had
opposed my appointment. But I had also some friends. My first
friend in Berkeley was Joe Levenson, a wonderful man- -immensely
talented. He taught Chinese history, mainly intellectual history,
also commanded European history and a great deal of Jewish lore, and
we talked about that to a certain amount.

Lage: When did he come on the faculty?

May: A year before I did.

Lage : So he was here when you came .

May: And we had both been to graduate school at Harvard and had a lot to
talk about.

Lage: Was he looking for somebody more congenial, as well?

May: I rather think so. I would guess so, yes. And the same year that I
came, Bob Brentano, who was terribly young, came--he had gotten his
degree at Oxford.

Lage: Also in European history?

May: Yes. Then in a year Ken Stampp, who'd been away for a year doing
research for his big book on slavery, came back. We were always

85

very cordial colleagues, though we didn't come to be really close
friends until some time after, particularly after we both retired.

And then I learned that Henry Nash Smith, who had been an
important influence on me intellectually, and a great supporter in
every possible way, and a very interesting man and a good friend,
was coming to the English department. And in I think '56 Bill and
Beverly Bouwsma came, after a big fight in the department that
you've doubtless heard about.

Lage : Right !

May: With the Bouwsmas we found ourselves immediately very compatible,

indeed. We used to spend evenings discussing religion and drinking
cheap whiskey until quite late at night. They were an influence on
my, at that time, rudimentary religious interest. So by '56 I had--
and I would say Jean had, too--a very rich life.

Also the Murchios had moved next door. He was not an academic,
but he was a biochemist and his wife a very talented potter and
other kinds of artist. They were very good for us, particularly
because Jack, who has a wonderful sense of humor, knew a lot of
people in the academic world but didn't take it too seriously and
tried to persuade me not to, which was extremely useful. Also, my
brother was living in San Francisco and my sister in Los Angeles
visited us from time to time. So by the middle to late fifties, we
lived here and were happy socially and a little bit less poor.

Life in the Berkeley Community

Lage: How did Jean and the children enjoy the Berkeley scene in the

fifties? What was it like to live here just as a regular citizen,
not the campus life?

May: Let me think about that a minute. I think at that time faculty
wives spent an awful lot of their time on the campus life—the
Section Club for all sorts of interests. And of course two young
children took up a lot of it and sort of keeping the show on the
road as far as 1 was concerned.

Lage: Were the schools adequate as far you were concerned?
May: Adequate, not better than that.
Lage: Not better than that?

86

May: No. Not at Kensington Grammar School, Portola Junior High, and El
Cerrito High School, they were okay, mediocre schools, but I regret
that we didn't look further.

Lage: You weren't in the Berkeley schools then?

May: No. Berkeley High was a more interesting school, I think. At El
Cerrito there were few, if any, really distinguished teachers,
though no incompetent ones, either.

Lage: Were you involved in any clubs like the Rosmos Club?

May: No, I was never invited to join the Kosmos Club. [laughter]

Lage: Did you eat at the Faculty Club for lunch?

May: Yes, usually.

Lage: Was that an important place to meet people?

May: Well, yes. I'll talk a bit later about Carl Bridenbaugh. He rather
ran things in the department after he came, shortly before I did,
and let it be known that one should eat in the Faculty Club. I ate
usually at the same table every day with people that were reasonably
congenial but not terribly. I always was very critical of the place
because at that time if you sat down with somebody you didn't know,
you didn't introduce yourself, which I think was a bad custom. The
food was not nearly as good as it's become. And of course there was
nothing to drink.

Political and Religious Attitudes of History Faculty

May: You asked, when we were talking this over, about political attitudes
of the department. I can say something about that. In the Faculty
Club, anybody who was not for Stevenson for president, and in
general a liberal Democrat, had a pretty hard time. There were a
few well-known conservatives, but they were in a distinct minority.
And I felt really that people were somewhat less tolerant of
difference than they had been in Claremont. Now Claremont was a
place where there were a lot of ultra-conservatives, but there were
others, too. And one felt when one went to the drug store that the
person in charge there knew exactly who you voted for as well as
what your income was .

Lage: [laughter] Oh, really!

87

May: Yes, and up here, since the faculty was so big, it was pretty self-
enclosed. That was one of the less good things.

Lage: I'm just trying to get a sense of what it was like when you say it
was sort of expected that every one would be a Stevenson supporter.
Did you just not voice, "Oh, I'm to the left of that"?

May: Well, I was a Stevenson supporter and I was calming down by that
time in politics.

Lage: But others? How politically correct was the atmosphere?

May: The term hadn't been coined, but it was, in terms of those days,
politically correct—New Dealers.

Lage: For instance, Jack Peltason, whom I've just finished interviewing,

said that he always got a kick out of putting Reader's Digest on his
coffee table to sort of make people-
May: [laughter] Yes. Well, quite a bit later, when I started going to
church, to refer to "our church" or something like that would cause
the same jolt. There was, as in the whole profession, a tacit anti-
Semitism—sometimes articulated in private. Everybody knew that it
was harder for a Jew to get a job. He had to work harder and be
brighter and more prolific and so forth. Even Levenson had his
enemies. A much milder anti-Catholicism, but in general, liberalism
and no particular interest in religion prevailed.

Lage: Well, it seems like there was also a mild anti-religion feeling from
what you said about giving people a jolt by going to church?

May: I wouldn't say an intolerance toward it, but surprise that anybody 'd
be interested in it.

Lage: And yet you say that Bill Bouwsma--

May: He was very different- -both Bouwsmas were very seriously religious.
Bill was the son of a philosopher who was an ardent Calvinist. They
were definitely church-going Episcopalians, but they were the people
with whom we talked about it. And I talked with Joe Levenson about
the difference between his religion and mine with some interest.

Lage: Would people make anti-Semitic remarks about someone like Joe
Levenson?

May: Only the worst of them. Only a few in the department.
Lage: The older guard?

88

May: Yes, some of the older, though not necessarily the oldest.

Lage: Carl Schorske mentioned- -not so much here, but in the East--a lot of
anti-Catholic feeling in the academy.

May: Oh, yes. Heavens, yes! I ran into that at Harvard- -especially, of
course, anti-Irish.

Lage: Let me ask you while we're on these attitude things: what about
attitudes towards divorce, infidelity? We're talking about the
fifties now.

May: Oh, it was assumed that people stayed together. The first divorce
in the department was Ren Stampp's, and that was a major shock.
Then within a few years there were several more and it became almost
run of the mill. But at this time it was assumed that you got
married when your career started, and the husband and wife both
worked on furthering the husband's career- -much as it had been in
Claremont, much as it was everywhere at that time.

Lage: At some point I want you to talk about attitudes about women in the
profession, but this might not be the place.

May: Well, no, there hardly were any. There were only a very few and

none in the history department. A good deal later, when through a
series of circumstances I was championing Adrienne Koch, people came
right out and said, "We'd never be able to talk freely among
ourselves" and "It would destroy confidentiality," and all sorts of
things like that. But for the most part in the fifties it wasn't an
issue.

Lage: Because it wasn't considered?
May: Yes, that's right.

Lage: When you had your dinner parties, did the women retire to a
different room?

May: I'll tell you about dinner parties.

Lage: Yes, tell me more about the dinner parties.

May: Well, that really goes with the battles of the department.

Lage: Oh, it does? Okay.

89
Faculty Battles over Hiring and Promotions

May: I've discussed these wars elsewhere at length and others have, too.
The leader of what we regarded as more or less the side of the
angels was Carl Bridenbaugh, who wanted desperately to make this
department at least as good as Harvard's, which had chosen somebody
else for a Job he very much wanted.

Lage: [laughs] I see.

May: He was utterly devoted and no trouble too great, no ambitions too

high. I don't think the department would have changed as quickly or
as completely without him.

Lage: What was he like as a person?

May: I hate to say anything too bad about him. He had his generous side,
but he could be a bit crass, and it all went together.

Lage: You're much too nice to give me any good stories. [laughter]

May: Well, his usual phrase was that we had to get rid of all the people
who couldn't cut the mustard. And up to this point no assistant
professors had ever been let go in the department.

Lage: Oh, I didn't realize that.

May: When I first came I was placed on a committee to review two of them,
one of whom had been a good friend in college, which made things
difficult. And much to the surprise of the people who appointed me
to the committee, I held out for letting them go. During this
period we let lots of people go. One thing that made that a little
less painful was that it was pretty much getting to be a boom time
in the profession so they always got good jobs. We made some
mistakes, but the level of the department got a lot better.

Lage: When you let them go, were you evaluating the quality of their
research and their publications?

May: It was usually, in fact, their research and writing, though some lip
service was paid to teaching as well—perhaps more than lip service,
but it was mainly their scholarship in comparison with the
scholarship of their field in the rest of the country. We developed
the idea that we didn't want anybody who wasn't at the top of his
field and made it stick pretty much. And as we got better and
better and as salaries got up, we got to a point where we could get
pretty much anybody we wanted. It got to be a very high powered
group. think the crucial point was passed with the appointment, I

90

think in "56, of Bill Bouwsma and Tom Kuhn at the same time. But
there were plenty of others.

Lage: When you say that you surprised people by moving to the side that
was going to uphold the strict standards, who do you think you
surprised?

May: Well, the chairman was still Hicks and I think he thought that I was
a nice Berkeley boy who [laughter] wouldn't make trouble.

Lage: But was he, himself, a good scholar?

May: I'd say he was. Yes, I'd say he was. He'd written one important
book.

Lage: He seemed to bring some good people to the campus. He brought you,
for instance, and Ken Stampp.

May: Yes, well, there was other support. I left out a very important
person—George Guttridge in English history. He was a generation
older. In fact, he was one of the few connections between my
university life and previous Berkeley life. He'd been a friend of
my parents. They'd met at Fallen Leaf Lake and entertained each
other back and forth, so I knew him when I was quite young. He was
a most interesting man. He was from Cambridge and I didn't
understand him really as well as I came to until I'd spent a year at
Cambridge myself. He had complete contempt for all American
categories of prestige or success. His own writing in eighteenth-
century English history was extremely subtle. There wasn't much of
it, but it was impeccable. And he could let one know what he
thought with only a flick of his moustache. So he was the closest
thing there was, except possibly for Henry Smith in English, to an
older person that I respected.

Lage: Now how did Raymond Sontag fit into all this?

May: Ray Sontag was also a most interesting man, conservative, an

increasingly ardent Catholic for one thing. He took a leave during
this period to work for the CIA for a while and was completely
different from most of us politically. He drifted to the
opposition, that is the anti-Bridenbaugh side, though nobody could
deny him a top intelligence. And he could be very agreeable when he
wanted to.

Lage: How was his research and writing regarded?

May: At that time he hadn't done much since he left Princeton. Before
that, very well. And then he didn't do anything much for a long,
long ti*ne. To get ahead in the story, after he had retired about

91

six years, he completed quite a major book. And yes, he was the
most formidable person among the opposition to the Bridenbaugh side
in the department.

Lage : He had power on campus as I understand.

May: He and John Hicks both had close relations with President Sproul,
much to the resentment of other people. [laughs]

Lage: As we go along with the story, I want you to discuss those

relationships between the department and the higher administration--
Clark Kerr and President Sproul. Kerr was chancellor the year you
came and that was the first year of the chancellorship, I think.
•52?

May: Either that or right after, I'm not quite sure. He as much as

anybody wanted to build up the university and increase its prestige
and excellence, and he would ordinarily give us anything we wanted.
If we wanted a higher salary to bring somebody here, more and more
we got it. The prosperity of the state, the support of the
administration, and then gradually a critical mass of highly
demanding scholars were what made the difference.

Lage: Were there end-runs around Kerr by this old guard up to Sproul? Is
that what you were saying about going to Sproul?

May: This was before Kerr became president.

Lage: I know Kerr felt he had very little power as chancellor initially.

May: This sort of a battle occurred in most departments, except in
departments that were absolutely first rate already- -perhaps
physics, perhaps anthropology, perhaps chemistry.

Lage: Was Lincoln Constance an important figure in all of this?

May: As dean? Yes, he took the unusual step in the case of the Bouwsma
appointment of supporting a minority, a large minority, against the
majority and that made the crucial change.

I thought I'd describe, as an example of the atmosphere, what a
faculty dinner party was like in these years when this was going on.
The department meetings were always at four and often lasted until
six. The dinner party would be called for seven, so you'd go home
and change and get there. Then you'd find that some of the people
there were assistant professors, so you couldn't talk about the
meeting in the afternoon and you couldn't talk about much of
anything that was going on. And the wife was usually upstairs
getting the children in bed a id so the other thing to do was for the

92

host to pour a lot of martinis, which was done so that by, oh, half
past eight, when you went in to eat, it didn't matter much what you
ate. Things tended to be a bit overcooked, anyway. [laughter)

Lage: Oh, dear! It doesn't sound too interesting, either.
May: Not elevating, no.

Lage: Why did they always have dinner parties after the department
meetings? Was that just the tradition?

May: Well, because it was Friday. I should have said that. Friday or
Saturday was when they had them, and somehow more often Friday, I
think.

Lage: And these were meetings that assistant professors didn't take part
in?

May: No, that's right. They were about promotions and appointments.
Lage: Is that still true? The assistant professors aren't part of them?

May: Usually, yes. They're consulted more, but they don't go to the

meetings that make these decisions because it's assumed that they
don't have the same permanent commitment to the place. It's not
true in all departments, but it was in history as long as I knew
anything about it.

Lage: Okay. Do you want to say more about the Bouwsma hiring and the role
you played and why you thought it was so important? What did you
see in Bouwsma?

May: Well, a brilliant and also a very congenial man. I read his first
book and then met him at meetings and we already knew we had a lot
in common. Then it just became the test case as to who was going to
win.

Lage: It was seen as the test case?
May: It was seen as the test case, yes.

Lage: You haven't read Ken Stampp's oral history, but he tells about kind
of making a deal. Were you in on this?

May: Oh, not directly. I understand what you mean.
Lage: Okay. Let's see where we are.

93

May: I should come back to teaching. In this period, as the department
and the university got filled with people who had come from eastern
and somewhat smaller universities and colleges—universities mainly
--and had been used to a type of teaching with smaller courses,
undergraduate seminars, term papers and so forth, there was a strong
emphasis on piling on the work, more papers, tougher grading, and so
forth, with encouragement from the university, at least to the level
of the dean. Which I thought was not all good because I think it
got to where the students had to skim an awful lot of books, and had
to work too hard in each course for the number of courses they were
taking. I think that had something in the long run to do with the
disaffection evidenced by the Free Speech Movement.

f*

May: I have one more comment on these department wars, too. As I hope I
made clear in talking at length about these faculty wars of the
fifties, I was not altogether out of sympathy with the old timers,
the rest of whom I think had a vision of the university that was
somewhat gentler, less competitive, less determined to be in the big
time. And since I'd been at the university when it was more like
that, I could understand a bit about what they felt. That was, some
of them, not all of them.

Lage : But did your Harvard experience also put the other more competitive
cast on it?

May: Oh, very much so, sure.

Lage: Would you have more to say about, should we call it, the "Boltonian"
view?

May: Well, the losing faction were people who had been almost appointed

to the department in the long chairmanship of Herbert Eugene Bolton,
whose theories of American history I didn't agree with, though he
had made quite a contribution.

Lage: Did you study with him when you were a student?

May: Never. No, the department was already factional. And I, through
the influence of Guttridge and McCormac, another friend of my
father's, went to the other group. You didn't go to both very much.

Lage: But were there other Americanists?
May: There weren't many Americanists.
Lage: Other than Bolton?

94

May: Yes, [Frederick L.] Paxson and then Hicks. But, let's see, what was
your question? Oh, about the Boltonians. He didn't ask the best of
his students to be members of the history department. And the one
that was most brilliant, Woodrow Borah, was all this long time in
the speech department.

Lage: That's amazing, because he couldn't be hired in the history
department, I understand.

May: Yes, that's right.

Lage: Was anti-Semitism a factor there, do you think?

May: I do, yes. Well, perhaps a little of the anti-intellectualism,
also.

Lage: When you got to Harvard, were people aware of Bolton? Did they have
attitudes towards Bolton?

May: Oh, they were aware of him, but no, not much. That is, there in the
center of early American history with monuments all around you and
so forth you didn't really think that the United States should be
studied in connection with Argentina or Brazil.

Lage: [laughs] Although I'm told now by young people I meet who are
studying in the Bancroft Library that the research that Bolton
students did is tremendously valuable. You know, they revisit those
research documents.

May: There were an awful lot of them. He started sending people to the
Archive of the Indies in Seville, and that was a big thing. Yes, I
don't put down his work, and he had some good students.

Lage: I guess that was an era where you had patrons in the faculty?

May: I don't know that that's changed. That is, everybody tries to

further the careers of his own students. It's assumed that he does
and should .

Lage: And some have more power than others.
May: Yes.

95
Graduate and Undergraduate Students

Lage: Would you say something about your students, say compared to
Scripps?

May: Oh, yes. In my intellectual history seminar, I had a lot of very
good students- -some not, of course—and in my seminar after about
the first year or so, they got steadily better and better.

Lage: This was a graduate seminar?

May: Yes. It was also a time when more and more people were coming from
excellent universities to here for graduate school as the whole tone
of the place improved. Naturally you got more exciting students.

Lage: What about lecture classes?

May: My intellectual history class was a lecture class.

Lage: Did you find that satisfactory as a teaching method after the small
college?

May: I'd lectured there, too, yes. I was still, I think, somewhat too
stiff as a lecturer. I think one wants to interrupt and ask for
questions and so forth, but lecturing is okay as one kind of
teaching, so long as it isn't all there is. As we got people from
eastern and smaller places, there were more and more small classes
for undergraduates, too.

Lage: Isn't that when they put in the 101 and 103 proseminars?

May: That's right. A little illusory, because it's impossible to staff
them except with graduate students-- some of whom are very good,
others not.

Lage: I guess that's still the case.
May: Yes.

Lage: Were other professors concerned that it was getting too tough and
too high pressure? No one's mentioned it to me but you.

May: Not much. No, I don't think so.

Lage: Did your students complain a lot? Why were you so sensitive to it?

96

May: I heard some complain, but I think it was just a strong feeling that
I'd always had that people don't do their best work under intense
quantitative pressure.

Lage: Maybe from your experience at Harvard with all the pressure?
May: Yes.

Lage: Were the students mainly from California? Were they rural, were
they urban?

May: That changes during this whole period. In this period by the mid-
fifties, anti-Semitism in the East was beginning to abate, but it
was still very much there, so by the middle or late fifties we had a
lot of Jewish students from the East—from New York, particularly--
and that raised the level of the seminars quite a lot.

Lage: So they were subjected to quotas at the eastern colleges, do you
think?

May: One way or another. It got so that in my seminar in American

intellectual history, quite a few of the students had had a course
in that subject at Harvard or at Columbia or something like that.
That is, the whole operation became not only a more intensive but a
more national- -even sometimes international—operation. That's
partly, of course, because of air travel.

History Conferences

Lage: Did the air travel also allow the Berkeley professors to go to more
of their own professional gatherings?

May: Oh, yes. I think I probably ought to say a word about conventions.
Lage: Yes, I think so.

May: Because it was a yearly or biyearly rite. I usually went to two.
In this period, since there wasn't any registry of jobs, a great
deal of that time was spent intriguing to get our students jobs.

Lage: Okay. Your own students or Cal students?

May: No, somebody would have a job open and we would try to get them for
a Cal student before somebody else did [laughs] and to hear about
where they were and then to do what we could. Then, of course, most
of the time was taken up with people reading papers. I don't think

97

that learned papers are usually made to be read aloud. It was only
very occasionally that a session would really take off and become
interesting and lively. Often it was just a matter of somebody
reading a paper so as to get a little more credit in his university.

As things got more high powered, there was a lot of
entertainment by publishers, always with a lot to drink. It was a
curious scene because here would be these publishers'
representatives pouring out expensive liquor and handing out hors
d'oeuvres and so forth while their wives at home were living by no
means on that scale. [laughter]

Lage: That's right.

May: So the meetings were very strenuous. One would come home tired.

But increasingly the main thing would be to see people that one knew
and one's own former students and so forth.

Lage: Did it help nationalize the profession, do you think?

May: Oh, very much so, sure.

Lage: Which were the two you went to?

May: The American Historical Association and what was then called the
Mississippi Valley Historical Association—it became the
Organization of American Historians.

Lage: And everybody did it, I'm assuming?

May: Most. Not all, no.

Lage: Did you have to pay your own way or were there special funds?

May: Sometimes one, sometimes the other. More and more the department
could help out with that. But A. M. Schlesinger advised his
students, no matter how poor they were, to set aside enough money to
go to the AHA convention, Just to be seen.

Lage: [laughs] You say that with a great deal of irony now. Did you take
it seriously then?

May: Not terribly.

Lage: But you had that sense of perspective at the time?

May: Yes, a good deal of it was a bore, but yet it had some excitement to
it. Another thing it did was familiarize one with a lot of American
cities.

98

Lage: Okay, I'm going to see what else I thought we missed here. Ken
Stampp mentioned that the Americanists on the faculty would get
together at some time on a regular basis and read papers to each
other. He only mentioned five people--! think yourself, [Charles]
Sellers, Bridenbaugh, [Hunter] Dupree, and himself.

May: This was a very peculiar institution founded and led by Carl

Bridenbaugh. He had the idea from other precedents that it was nice
to get together and read papers. Sometimes it was the Americanists,
sometimes it was the people who were in his favor right at the
moment .

Lage: I see, so he sort of organized it.

May: What was supposed to happen was that one's wife was supposed to
prepare a very good dinner and then get out of the way and not
appear. And there 'd be an awful lot to drink so that sometimes
people didn't pay as much attention to papers as they might. I
think this was not a very successful institution here.

Lage: Did the wives bristle at this at all, or would they just as soon not
have to listen to the papers?

May: I think the latter was more the case. [laughter]

More on Teaching and Faculty Battles

Lage: I wanted to ask you about the progress in introducing intellectual
history—did you get opposition? Who were the people who said it
was--

May: "Nailing jelly to the wall," and so forth? Well, Sontag, Hicks.
Paxson, I think, coined that a bit earlier. He was no longer
around.

Lage: Sontag even taught European intellectual history!

May: Oh, yes. He didn't gripe about that. But since that was what I was
supposed to do and that was what I'd been hired to do, I didn't run
into any of the particular flak on that. The question would be
whether they'd send their students to my seminars. Some would, some
would not.

Lage: So someone in political history might just tell their students not
to bother with this?

99

May: They might.

Lage: How were you aware of that? Just by who showed up or not?

May: I heard from some of the students when I would get to know them.

Lage: Was there tension on doctoral boards between different professors?

May: I think that was usually under control. The oral examinations were
--four out of five of them—pretty dreadful affairs, whether the
student passed or not. And we became stricter. Once in a while it
gradually evolved into a real discussion among colleagues, and then
you'd know the person was going to pass, probably with distinction.

Lage: Okay, now anything else we can get out of this subject of teaching,
curriculum?

May: On this whole subject of the wars of the fifties? No, in general
through the fifties I was very happy in my environment, and such
opposition as I ran into sometimes bothered me, but on the whole my
side won on most things. I remember once that Jean pointed out that
I, who used to be a radical, now liked and admired the president of
the university, the chancellor, and my department chairman,
[laughs] But I was happy to the point of approaching complacency,
despite a good deal of strain. I'll come to the strain because that
comes in the writing.

Lage: And the complacency might come in the politics?
May: Sure, yes.

Lage: Now this is the last thing I'm going to dig on: did you know
President Sproul?

May: No.

Lage: Did you have social engagements with Clark Kerr?

May: No. I got to know him some, more in the period of the sixties in
the controversies.

100
Writing and Publication of The End of American Innocence

Lage: Okay. Now, let's go on to Innocence.'

May: All right. During all this period when I was involved in teaching,
department wars, committees and so forth, it was also assumed that I
better write another book and pretty soon. Well, I had thought I
was writing a book for a long time, almost since my first book, on
the decline of radicalism in the 1920s. I spent an enormous amount
of time reading files of obscure periodicals and so forth. And then
I realized that if you wanted to say why radicalism declined, you
don't look at the radicals, you look at the whole society. (sighs)
So I started writing a book on the twenties in all aspects of
literature, politics, and so forth. But gradually I got interested
what I thought would be the first chapter or so- -the period right
before the First World War, when a lot of the movements of the
twenties got going, till finally that became the subject of the
book.

I think this is what happens in history that doesn't happen in
social sciences: you don't set out to ask a question, and the
question develops as you go. I applied for a Guggenheim to get a
term off, but I didn't get it and so this book had to be written
while taking full part in every other part of campus activity.

I gradually thought I found a prewar movement of thought and
culture that extended to almost every field involving a premium on
spontaneity and intuition in resistance to the materialism of the
late nineteenth century. I read most magazines of the period, from
the serious monthlies and quarterlies, which were excellent of their
kind, to the many literary and eventually avant-garde periodicals.
I read through those and I also noted down the books, foreign or
American, that were reviewed in these various periodicals and read
them as far as I could- -all of them that were prominently reviewed.

Lage: Where did you find these periodicals? Were they in the Cal library?

May: Mostly in the Cal library, but I ordered some. I didn't travel. I
didn't have funds to travel, and that's why I didn't use more
manuscripts in this because I couldn't get to where they were. But
I don't altogether regret that. I think that there was a great deal
of life in the published literature of this period.

'The End of American Innocence; A Study of the First Years of Our Time,
1912-1917 (New York: Knopf, 1959).

101

Lage: For this kind of work it seems like that was what you were looking
at.

May: Yes. And so it gradually took shape.

Lage: How long were you working on it? It sounds like quite a long
process.

May: Well, since before I came to Cal. I started on what I thought was
this book on the decline of radicalism in the twenties while I was
in Claremont and The End of American Innocence was published in
1959, so approximately ten years, I'd say, possibly a little more.

Lage: What kind of pressure did you feel?

May: Oh, yes. As an example, the time came for me to come up for a full
professorship. I had had the great good luck to come to the
university as an associate professor, and Carl Bridenbaugh told me
that because I hadn't gotten my book done, I should withdraw my name
so as not to be defeated and disappoint my friends. Well, I went
for a morning's walk around the Berkeley hills and decided I wasn't
going to do that and so my name went in. I later found that I was
passed for the promotion unanimously, but that's an example of how
one felt pressure. And everybody did.

Lage: And Carl Bridenbaugh as the source?

May: Well, yes, but the whole culture of the university increasingly. It
wouldn't have been so in the old days, of course.

Lage: Because you would have been promoted after a period of time?

May: Sure.

Lage: Okay. Tell me more about the shape of the book.

May: It first discusses at length the old culture: its periodicals, its
publications, and its essence which I define as a triptych, with
moralism in the center and on one side progress and on the other
side culture. Sometimes these came into conflict, but what made it
such an exciting period was that the nineteenth century polite
culture was still there and yet there were all sorts of rebellions
against it. I suggested the figure of people busily laying powder
in the cracks of the structure.

Then it goes to the antecedents, going back through the
nineteenth century up to the late nineteenth century, with a big
emphasis on William James, who I think was the most important. And
the ba :tlcs that were fought out in each publishing house and in

102

each magazine. And then finally the characteristics of what I call
the "innocent rebellion." And then the effect of the war, on which
I've been misunderstood. Saying that many of the movements were
started before the war seemed as if I was making the First World War
less important in the history of American culture, but I think I was
making it more important because the movements were there and were
fairly strong, but the breakthroughs came after the older culture
had been smashed by the war. In general, it was true that partisans
of genteel culture were supporters of the war because they were
usually Anglophiles for one thing and some of the avant-garde people
were too, but some were not. The great patron of the avant-garde, I
guess, was [H. L.] Mencken, who was already important before the war
and who was not so much a pacifist as a Germanophile. But the book
ends with the war.

People thought that I would go on and write a book on the
twenties. And so did I, but I didn't. I'll come to that later.

Then I come to the problem of getting it published. I sent it
first, I think, to Knopf because he was the most prestigious
publisher and published books of other members of the department.

Lage: Did you feel good about what you were sending?

May: Yes. What I sent was the first part on the older culture, somewhat
less exciting. And it came back with a letter saying, "This will
not do." And it came back actually postage due. It deeply insulted
me.

Lage: [laughs]

May: Then a little later Blanche Knopf came to town. She always stayed

in the Mark Hopkins [hotel] with her French maid. And she called up
and said would I come over and talk with her. And I said, "Really,
Mrs. Knopf, I don't see what there is to talk about." "Nonetheless,
I would appreciate it if you did." So I came over. And she asked
about the book and so forth and then offered me a contract. So I
was in a rather awkward position between the husband and wife,
[laughs]

Lage: So it was Mr. Knopf that had turned it down.

May: Yes, but then he came around. She pushed him to come around. But
he never really liked the book. When I interviewed each of them as
participants in this prewar movement- -

Lage: So they were sources for your book?

103

May: Yes, they were that, too. I found out why Alfred Knopf didn't like
the book. I asked him repeatedly about a publisher named Mitchell
Kennerley, who had published a number of the bright young people in
the prewar period. And he said, oh, he wouldn't pay much attention
to him, he didn't matter very much. I found later that Knopf had
worked for Kennerley and had left him, allegedly taking with him
some of his most profitable authors. So he was very sensitive on
that subject and in general on this period in which he'd played a
considerable part.

However, they published the book. And in general, with some
distinct exceptions, it got very well reviewed. I later found out
through the indiscreet memoir of somebody who was on the Pulitzer
committee that it had been awarded the Pulitzer by the professors
but that was overruled by the journalists and given to somebody
else. It would have made a great deal of difference to me in my
professional life and otherwise if I'd gotten that, but I did get a
good deal of recognition for it--rather more in England than in
America.

Lage: I noticed that it was published in England shortly afterwards.

May: Yes, yes.

Lage: Now, how important are the reviews to your own faculty?

May: Very important, indeed. I've had some bad ones, and I think I

mentioned to you that my first book, the most conventional, was the
one that was reviewed unanimously favorably. There were some
unfavorable reviews of Innocence.

Lage: What were the objections, do you recall? We shouldn't focus on the
unfavorable since there weren't many.

May: I guess in general that it was too wide a subject for me to handle
things with enough depth. I guess that was the main one.

Lage: In the writing of it or in the process did you solicit advice and
review from your fellow faculty? Was that a standard thing?

May: It was, but I didn't do it much. I didn't get it, anyway. When I
was up for full professor, of course, I had to submit what I had
done thus far.

Lage: Yes, but did you seek advice while you were writing it?

May: No, if I remember- -oh, yes, one big exception. Henry Smith was my
mainstay and read and understood what I was doing always. One of
his very great qualities ar 1 a rare one is that he was able in

104

reading people's manuscripts not to tell them how he would have done
it but to try to make it better the way they were doing it. He was
most supportive all the way through and that's part of the reason 1
dedicated the book to him.

Lage: And what about Jean? Did she get at all involved in it?

May: Oh, yes. She hadn't done the research, didn't know the subject

matter particularly, but she'd certainly say whether she thought it
was a good chapter. She's always read what I said and sort of made
a general judgment on it, always a good one.

May: After I finished a chapter, that's when we'd go on one of our mini-
vacations.

Lage: Ah, something to look forward to.
May: Yes.

Lage: Did you struggle over the writing? You didn't have to learn how to
write.

May: Well, no, I don't think so. I've always been more interested in

writing than in anything else. I think my criticism of the book is
that there are perhaps too many publishing firms, too many
periodicals and all that. I think it might be a bit better book if
I'd been more impressionistic, but I was trying to show that
intellectual history was serious research.

Lage: You mentioned in the acknowledgments for the book the role of your
graduate students and the seminars. Tell me how that worked.

May: I had my seminar doing topics in the period I was working in and
often I got a lot of information from them and sometimes critical
ideas, too. That worked very well.

Lage: Any particular graduate students?

May: In this period? More in the next one and for the next book, I
think, for my Enlightenment2 book, but there were a number that
contributed.

Lage: Did you have women graduate students during this period?

2The Enlightenment in imerica. 1976.

105

May: Yes, not many, but some.

Lage: Were they encouraged to go on at a professional level, or were they
seen as dabblers?

May: No, I don't think that was case. It hadn't even been the case at
Harvard. There just weren't very many. But no, I think they
received equal treatment.

Lage: How did you address your graduate students, and they you?

May: Oh, in this period, this was "Mr. May." At Harvard and at Cal you
were never called doctor, or seldom, because that was assumed. All
through the fifties, you'd call them Mr. and Miss until, say, a
student got through his orals and was in the very last period. Then
sometimes you'd use his first name and he'd use yours after he got
the degree, but not before. It was rather rigid.

Lage: That's an interesting little touch. I don't think today's students
would understand.

May: Oh, no. Well, this had changed before I had stopped teaching.

Lage: My daughter was at Santa Cruz, but as an undergraduate, a few years
ago. She would call her professors by their first names.

May: Sure, it even happened at Harvard when I was there as a graduate

student. The favorite students of Perry Miller or Matthiessen would
call them Perry or Matty. Nobody ever called Mr. Schlesinger
anything but that, including people who'd been his graduate students
twenty years before.

Lage: Now is there more about the book, or how you would have changed the
interpretation as you look back?

May: No, I don't think so.

Fulbright Fellowship in Belgium

May: One thing was that by the time I got it done with all the other

stresses, I was very tired. And that's a reason why I decided to
apply for a Fulbright, to have a year abroad.

Lage: Tell me about that.

106

May: The lecturing Fulbrights in American studies were absolutely

wonderful for the professors who got taem. Before this it had been
a very big thing and maybe once in lifetime when somebody in
American history went to Europe. Now people went much more
casually, much more often, and that was good.

My criticism of the Fulbright program was that it didn't build
onto strength where there was strength in the foreign university but
sometimes introduced the subject. It was not likely under those
circumstances to be taken terribly seriously. I think there was a
special kind of demand and supply situation; some of the European
professors were skeptical of anything that came free. And the
Fulbright secretaries in each place—for instance, in Brussels—were
so eager to say, "Our man will go anywhere, and do anything you
want, will lecture anywhere on anything," that it made them a little
bit more suspicious, I think.

Lage: Did you go to the university without your own class to teach?

May: No, I'll tell you about that in some detail. I went to Belgium
because if you went to France you had to go to two universities.
And we thought, with the children, moving to Europe for a year was
enough without moving also in the middle, and at Brussels you could
stay where you were.

Now I taught—or lectured, anyway— in the four universities:
the University of Ghent, the University of Liege, the Free
University of Brussels, and the University of Louvain. These
sharply differed in language and in ideology. That is, Ghent, of
course, is Flemish, Liege definitely Francophone, Louvain Catholic,
and the Free University of Brussels, as it was always called,
distinctly anti-Catholic. You could not be a Catholic; you could
not go to mass or confession and teach there, though amusingly they
made an exception for Protestants because while they would believe
something unreasonable, they weren't authoritarian- -that was their
view. But I taught in all these and learned an awful lot about
Belgium.

I went back there later for another period of time. I probably
learned more about Belgium than about any other European country.
But there or anywhere else we went— and I'm happy to say we have
traveled a lot- -my concern was always not to be an American
historian visiting this country, but to try to learn as much as I
could about the place I was. I have a strong conviction that this
sort of thing is never wasted in your work on an American subject.
It's stimulating and deepening, I think.

We lived in Brussels, which is a French-speaking city, much to
the anger of the Flemish- speaking part of the country. The girl?

107

were in a good French-speaking school not far from where we lived, a
private school alleged to be progressive.

Lage: Did they adapt well to that? How old were they at this point?

May: They were, let's see, ten and twelve, I think. The older one had a
tough time because she was in the sixieme, which is where people get
sorted out as to whether they can go on to a higher school and tough
work.

Lage: Did they know French?

May: They knew a bit, but they learned it. The younger one adapted very
well, spoke fluent but sloppier French, had a French-speaking best
friend and so forth. But they both think it was a very valuable
experience. It's an experience more and more American children were
having—diplomatic children, business children. But often they went
to American or English schools and we decided against that and I've
been glad of that.

It was something of the same experience, particularly for
Hildy, the older one, as the one I had had in going to Europe in the
middle of schooling. The return is a little bit hard, not as hard I
think as it had been for me.

Then I had one major experience there that I have written an
article about — it's not published — and that came about because there
was money accorded in the Fulbright program for language study in
the language of the country you were in. I had pretty good French
already, so mine went for work with a teacher of diction, of correct
speech and writing, but also of literature. This took me to Madame
Berthe Patigny, who was a tremendous experience for me. The main
thing she did was to have me read aloud. To get over the "Anglo-
Saxon phlegm" I had to read a haute voix— to read dramatically
everything from Villon up to contemporary poets. The primary book
was an anthology, but also I bought the admirable little editions of
all the major writers. This was most exciting and I thought gave me
a real insight into French culture. She was French. Her husband
was Belgian, and she had complete contempt for everything Belgian, I
would say, including him.

Lage: Including her husband!

May: Yes. She could tell you who won the Prix Goncouurt and the other

ones for the last ten years. And then recently, though it was dying
out, there had been public competitions in reciting. She cared very
deeply about French literature—had no knowledge and no interest in
any other literature, hardly knew there was such a thing. But the
intensity of her devotion was quite a revelation. And she also had

108

a sense of humor and knew that she and what she was doing were
becoming obsolete. She could imitate young people and their current
lingo quite well. So that was, I think, the biggest experience for
me in Brussels.

Then we also traveled from Brussels. One time in early spring
--the school vacation in Easter week, rather--we drove from Brussels
to Florence, where Bill Bouwsma had a sabbatical and where the
Bouwsmas were living. And that was most exciting—driving through
Europe, with the fruit blossoms coming out, often sprouting out of
old buildings. That was a thrilling experience.

Then there was one other thing. The heat was off and I didn't
have too much to do and I didn't have any pressures, so I had some
time to think and even meditate a bit walking around Brussels and
this was when I became more seriously interested in religion. We
went to a Church of England church there on Sunday, mostly to get
the English periodicals which were sold there and to hear some
English. And we found that when we didn't go, we missed it. That
was a quite important beginning.

Lage: It sounds as if you and Jean sort of traveled along this route
together?

May: Me ahead. I went along, at first, farther than she did. But this

was the beginnings of my movement slowly towards something of a more
religious commitment, although always one that was sort of
borderline, I'd say. Where it ended is that I knew I believed in
something but couldn't define what it was.

Lage: It's interesting that it took place in Belgium, away from home and
also at this place where there was so much division between the
religions in the academy.

May: Yes, that's right. The only division to amount to anything is that
there are ardent Catholics and loose or French-style Catholics. It
was a wonderful year for all four of us, and I think when we left we
had the feeling that if we'd stayed one more year we would have
really been at home. [ laughs J

Lage: Did it change at all your view of American culture or American
studies?

May: Yes. Getting to know some European universities and talking to
other people who had Fulbrights elsewhere made me realize how
wonderful American universities were. The norm, in Belgian
universities particularly, was that people heard about six lecture
courses and then were examined orally and perfunctorily, mainly to

109

give back what the professor had said. They didn't read much. The
English ones were not like that.

I should say that after the Belgian year we spent the summer in
England and Scotland seeing relatives and traveling about there.
But the important part was the continental part.

Lage: Was there anything to say about your teaching of American studies
there and the reaction of students and other professors?

May: Well, the ones that I dealt with were very supportive, particularly,
I think, at Liege. At Louvain I lectured only a few times, but in
French and for that Madame Patigny prepared me very carefully.

Lage: You were glad to have her?
May: Oh, boy, I sure was!

Lage: They probably wouldn't have had much tolerance for a sloppy-
accented French.

May: Well, it's better if you could speak somewhat correctly and answer
questions. But there were real differences in lots of things—let
me give an example. At Liege 1 had a small class and they read
Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience." That always turns on
American students, it echoes very deeply in their feelings, but they
couldn't see what was so good about Thoreau--just a very selfish and
not a great man. "Who is a great man?" "Marx."

Lage: Oh! Interesting. Were they respectful of American culture or were
they contemptuous?

May: It varied person to person. And again, the ones I dealt most with
had a certain stake in it themselves. Some of them were teaching
American literature, particularly at Liege. That was the most
venturesome of the universities in that way. And the audience at
Louvain was interested in my lecture on American religions as
something very bizarre and outlandish.

Lage: Hm! [laughs] That's interesting.

Work on The Enlightenment in America

Lage:

Do you want to go back to your return to Berkeley?

110

May: Yes, I think so. I came back in 1960 to a very flourishing

department at the height of its prestige and strength. And at this
point I decided I wanted to write a book not about the twenties but
a book about the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, partly
because there wasn't any good book, but also because in lecturing 1
got immensely interested in Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and others.
So I was working on that book from then on until—to get way ahead
of the story-- 1976, because I had to reeducate myself completely in
early American history, which is considered by many people—
particularly those practicing it--a very special history. Indeed,
it had its own bibliography and practices and ways of finding
material and so forth.

The organizing principal of the book—that there are four main
kinds of Enlightenment, all distinctive but related—came to me
actually in the middle of a seminar when I was talking about the
Enlightenment. I had about 100 or 150 pages and went back and
rewrote them with that in mind.

Lage: So teaching really helps clarify your thinking, it seems?

May: Yes. So I wanted to use Widener Library to educate myself— f irst of
all by reading the main European sources of the Enlightenment and
then learning the bibliographical tricks used in early American
history. So we, through a friend, got a house in Concord, Mass, and
settled there. It's about an hour's drive or train ride to
Cambridge.

Lage: Now when was this?
May: This is '63 to '64.

Lage: Did you have an appointment at Harvard, or you were just there for
the studying?

May: For a summer I had. Some Harvard faculty members were cordial and
as always some were not. But living in Concord, which is so much a
center of New England culture with Emerson and Hawthorne all around
you and of course the Minuteman monument at the bridge where the
Revolution started—

Lage: And Walden Pond.

May: — nearby and a lot of wonderful old houses, and so forth. We lived a
bit out of town in the woods. Interestingly, these woods were posted
by signs saying you could walk in them if you wanted but not to pick
anything, and these were signed by the owners who were named Emerson
and Butterick. It was the same Emerson family, and Butterick was the
major at the Concord fight, so there was a certain amount of

Ill

continuity, though the people we got to know there were not connected
with this for the most part.

Jean worked in the Concord bookstore, which she enjoyed a lot.
And we both found that though we loved New England and went into
rhapsodies when we first started seeing New England houses and
graveyards, we couldn't live there. It was too conservative and too
stuffy a society. In Concord anybody who sold a house to an Irish
person was regarded as treasonable. It was [laughs wryly] still pretty
much like that.

Lage: Jean had come from New England, had she not?

May: Yes, but she found that she couldn't live there either anymore, though
we were very fond of the place and the landscape and the artifacts and
so forth. While I was there I wrote an article called "The Recovery of
American Religious History,"3 which I think is the most influential
article I ever wrote and perhaps the most controversial. I had learned
that ever since I'd been working on my thesis that religious history
was more and more neglected except by the people who had come under the
influence of Perry Miller and a few others, so that the books were very
old books and all sorts of topics were neglected. This was in the
middle of the fifties when there was a distinct rise in numbers—and
money, at least—in American religion— lots of building of churches and
all that.

I sent it to the American Historical Review, and they hesitated a
long time and then sent me the correspondence that they'd had. Some of
the board of editors didn't believe it was possible that there was a
religious revival going on and did not think that the topic was valid,
but others disagreed and they did decide to publish it. And that's
been cited, I think, more and more because it happened that there were
a lot of other people at the time who were going into American
religious history and, indeed, who had found that you can't understand
much about American culture, even American politics, unless you do know
something about American religious history.

Lage: But were you talking in the article about the rise of interest in
religion at the time?

May: Just mentioned it. Mainly the lack of scholarship in a great many
important fields. And I mentioned that most of what there was was
about Protestantism, not much about either Catholicism or Judaism at
that time.

Interestingly enough, at the conventions that came right after
that I was invited to be chairman of a session at the American Catholic
Historical Society and also at the American Society for Church History,

'Reprinted in Ideas. Faiths, and Feelings: Essays in American
Intellectual and Religious History. 1952-1982 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983).

112

which is mostly Protestant seminary historians. But again, I had
time there to write that article.

Lage: Did your interest in this relate to your own sort of coming towards
a religious awakening?

May: Oh, certainly it did. But I didn't say that in the article.

Lage: No, but it did?

May: Oh, sure. Anything more about that time in Cambridge?

Lage: I can't think of anything.

Department Chair. 196A-1966

May: The main thing that happened to me there—not altogether unexpected
--was a letter from the dean inviting me to be chairman of the
department. I say not unexpected because they'd gone through most
of the other plausible people. [laughs]

Lage: It was about your turn!

May: Yes, it was about my turn. I knew that.

Lage: I saw that Carl Schorske, for instance, became chairman after he'd
only been here two years!

May: Yes, but was only chairman for a year, as I remember it. So I wrote
to friends making appointments. Joe Levenson was one vice chairman,
Richard Herr was the other. I went back to Berkeley absolutely
determined to give the job of chairman my very best effort, and I
enjoyed it. It was then a remarkably powerful job—that is, making
recommendations to the administration not only about appointments
from the outside, but changes in the status inside and even what are
called merit raises.

Lage: Do you rely on the committee of tenured professors in order to do
those?

May: Yes, but you also read all the stuff yourself. And I did all I
could to read all the material by members of the department.

Lage: Tremendously time-consuming!

113

May: Yes, it was. It took pretty much my full time. I just taught one
seminar.

Lage: Are we going to talk about this in the context of the sixties?

May: Yes, I will. I'm coming to that.

Lage: Because you had mentioned that you had twenty appointments to make!

May: Yes, because Clark Kerr wanted to run the university on a quarterly
basis with four equal quarters. It never worked. The faculty was
always against it, which had a certain amount to do with their lack
of support in the crisis. When I was chairman I had a lot of
discussions with the financial representative from the
administration, but what it came to was that if we wanted to appoint
somebody the money was always to be found.

Chancellor Edward Strong

Lage: Those were the salad days.

May: Those were indeed the salad days. [laughter] However, there turned
out to be a few explosive ingredients in that salad. I was enjoying
it very much and then, at the time, Ed Strong, whom I'd known when I
was an undergraduate, was the chancellor. Maybe the height of the
whole period was when he was inaugurated and President Kennedy came
and gave the speech about it.

Lage: Now were you there for that?
May: Yes.

Lage: Yes, that was before the Harvard year. It was spring of 1962, I
think .

May: I think that's right.

Lage: Tell me about how you saw that event.

May: Well, Kennedy talked about all the appointments he'd made from

Berkeley, starting with Robert McNamara, but many others. And he
used his wit and his Harvard irony very effectively. It was in the
stadium and he said, "In my day, this sort of crowd could only have
been attracted by an athletic event and now they come to hear a
politician. It's this sort of thing that makes me worry about the
f ibe : ot American youth." Now, of course, he had us in his hand

114

after that pretty much. And it was sort of a symbolic occasion,
partly because it was the inauguration of Ed Strong, who was to be
shot down in flames so shortly afterward.

But while I was chairman and very full of being chairman--!
will admit that I got some pleasure out of having a big office and a
secretary and so forth--! resolved that I was going to act quite
differently than I had because I realized that this was not a job
you could plan, that it was a job of crises that would come up that
you had to deal with ad hoc, and on the whole I did that and it was
good for me.

Lage: You even realized that before the troubles, it sounds like?

May: Oh, yes. But of course that wasn't a very long time. Strong

invited all the chairmen in rotation to have lunch with him. At the
one that I was at he went through a great many things that were
happening and said, "By the way, there was this little strip of land
outside Sather Gate--"

If

May: --where according to a current policy of not collecting money or

making direct religious or political proselytizing, we have banned
that sort of thing. And I suppose there'll be those who will talk
about free speech." Everybody was supposed to laugh politely, but I
later kicked myself around a good deal because as an undergraduate
I'd known something about the same strip of land and the arguments
about free speech then and I should have said something to the
effect of, "Watch out," but I did not. So my honeymoon, you might
say, as chairman was over by the fall of the year [laughter] I
became chairman.

Lage: That's very interesting to me because often it's treated as more an
oversight than a decision. They were told to cede that land to the
City of Berkeley and it wasn't done. And this sounds almost as if
it were a decision?

May: Yes, well it was treated very casually. It turned out not to be a

casual matter to the students as you know. Just why things exploded
and why here and not somewhere else is something I'd like to leave
for next time.

Lage: Right. Could I ask you a little bit more about if you knew Strong
well as a fellow faculty member and what your opinion of him had
been?

May: He had been a friend when he was an assistant professor of my close
college friend Burr Overstreet, and consequently he had been one of

115

those who was invited to sit on the bleachers on Mrs. Overstreet's
roof and watch football games.

Lage: Back when you were a student?

May: Yes, I'd known him.

Lage: And was he also a student?

May: No, he was an assistant professor. That is, he was a friend of

Burr's father, who had been a philosophy professor here. So I knew
him, but not very well. Then he had been, also, since he taught
philosophy of history, somebody that the history department always
sent a lot of students to.

Lage: But you didn't have a relationship with him as a faculty member?

May: Certainly not anything like a close one. No, I didn't particularly
know him well.

Campus Political Scene in the Fifties

Lage: Do you think we've set the scene for next time?
May: I think so. Do you?

Lage: Yes, very much. Maybe we should just discuss, in the context of the
political scene in the late fifties, the interest in the issue of
Communist speakers on campus.

May: I would say that there were certainly left students as there always
had been. Not as many as when I'd been a student in the thirties.
On the whole the spectrum in the faculty ran from mostly liberal to
a few radical and rather fewer conservative, so that it was pretty
much assumed that when the students made gestures like trying to
interrupt the meeting of the House Committee for Un-American
Activities at the San Francisco City Hall that the faculty were on
their side. In fact, people who'd turned out to be very
conservative in the later crises, in the decade of the sixties were
conspicuous in that group.

Lage: Supporting the anti-HUAC activities?

May: Yes. I had made speeches about McCarthyism which didn't take any
particular guts in Berkeley—not nearly as much as if you'd made
speeches for it, certain! 7. But I had been sc wrapped up with the

116

university and what I was doing and my writing that these were not
intensely political years for me.

Lage: Let me ask you: I know that there 'd been an effort to force the
issue on Communist speakers on campus and Ken Stampp talks about
that. Now, you've told me that you weren't particularly involved in
that?

May: I think not.

Lage: But you did chair a lecture series on communism.

May: Oh, yes. That was when the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade was

very active in Cal. So a group of us organized what were supposed
to be serious and objective lectures on communism in various places.

Lage: A historic look at communism.

May: Yes, that's right. Let's see. there was Richard Webster on

communism in Italy, Franz Schurmann on communism in China. Did we
have a German? No, Carl Schorske gave sort of a wrap-up lecture on
the subject in general. And there were big audiences. It went
well. We intended to put it in a book and as a matter of fact it
was announced for publication. Oh, Martin Malia and Russia!
[laughs] Of course, I could hardly leave that out.

Lage: Right.

May: But unfortunately his contribution never came in and the lectures
were never published. But it was an effort to make the discussion
of the subject more serious.

Lage: More scholarly?
May: Yes.

Lage: But it was a very separate thing from the inviting Communist
speakers on campus .

May: That's right. Actually, right before the upheaval, Clark Kerr had
gotten some sort of academic freedom award for permitting Communist
speakers under certain circumstances. I think there had to be a
faculty sponsor or something like that. I was not active in that
issue.

Lage: Okay, I think we're at a good point to continue next time.
May: All right, yes. Fine.

117
Throckmorton Manor it

Lage: Before we leave the fifties, something I've heard about that I'd
like to know more about is Throckmorton Manor.

May: I know a little, but really you should ask Bob and Carroll Brentano,
who know much more, and were close to the people involved.

Lage: Tell me what you know.

May: It was a large, very dilapidated former mansion on Telegraph Avenue,
where a bunch of students lived. They had found the name
Throckmorton Manor in the British Magazine, "Country Life," and
named their house accordingly. They even had cocktail napkins
printed.

The students who lived there were mostly from the history
department, but some from other departments. One thing that was
notable about it was it was one of the first places where men and
women openly lived together. And that was enough to make some
professors—not most—think that it was not a place faculty members
should go. The students who lived at Throckmorton had formal
parties—evening dress required— and the cops were suspicious
because they'd see these elderly men, some of them in evening
clothes— one of them John Hicks, who was a dean— going to these
parties. Some of them suspected that it was a house of
prostitution.

Lage: [laughs]

May: What it was in part also was a house of disaffection; they believed
as a matter of faith that all the more interesting students — and the
livelier students — always were flunking their orals, so they'd have
a wake whenever that happened.

Lage: Did it happen very often?

May: Oh, yes! In the fifties, sure, we were pretty tough. Sometimes

somebody from Throckmorton would call up after one of their friends
had failed and tell us that we'd done a terrible thing.

Lage: Did it have a beat quality?

May: Sort of.

Lage: It doesn't sound like it with the evening dress, though.

May: Oh, yas. Well, that was parody. I; was all parcdy.

118

Lage : Yes.

May: These were graduate students who wanted to defy the mores of the
fifties and also who objected to the rather strict and tough
standards of the history department and others.

Lage: But they did invite their professors?

May: Oh, sure. Yes.

Lage: I would think of John Hicks as being a rather establishment figure.

May: Oh, very much so, yes.

Lage: He would show up?

May: Yes.

Lage: Would Raymond Sontag show up at Throckmorton?

May: No.

Lage: Some drew lines?

May: Well, sure.

Lage: Okay, anything else about that?

May: I don't think so. And this makes a good place to end the fifties.

Throckmorton perhaps looked back to the twenties for its spirit, and
certainly could not have existed in the serious, committed sixties.

Lage: Okay. Next time the sixties.

119

VI STUDENT PROTEST AT BERKELEY IN THE SIXTIES
[Interview 5: August 13, 1998] II

Attitudes Toward the Student Movement

May: Okay, I'm going to start with my general assumptions going into the
sixties.

Lage: Sounds very good. We're approaching FSM [Free Speech Movement].

May: First, I had some lurking sympathy for the students, and I'm quite
sure that if I'd been one of them I would have taken some part, but
I don't think I would have gone all the way. I had all the more
sympathy because this was, as I came to realize, a romantic
movement—not a rationalist or materialist movement like the one in
the thirties. It was based on emotions, individual feelings, and so
forth. Also, mainly through our daughters, Jean and I had some
sympathy for some aspects of the youth culture, which every parent
had to come to terms with one way or another. We had grown, for
instance, to like the Beatles, we could tolerate Joan Baez, and
particularly admired Bob Dylan, who I think is an important poet.

Lage: How old were your daughters at the time?

May: Fifteen and seventeen. But I rejected the movement both as a

historian and as a person. I was never able to believe in instant
liberation, which I think was what was demanded. And I had a long
standing suspicion and fear of mass movements. Very likely that
goes back as far as high school and junior high school, when I was a
loner, and to a certain extent, persecuted. This, and probably my
family status as a youngest child, left me with strong anti-
ma joritarian tendencies and, indeed, rather a tendency to take the
opposite of what was dominant even when it was right.

120

And another thing that's not to be underrated: I was very happy
and contented, as I've tried to show, in the university as it was in
the fifties, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Lage: Even though you have expressed some discomfort with the kinds of
pressures?

May: Oh, yes, oh sure. Of course there was that. And I think it had

something to do with what happened, too. Now, any questions about
that, so far?

Lage: No, I think that's fairly clear.

May: All right. Then, as usual, I was divided in my feelings. As
always, one might say.

Precipitating Events of the Free Speech Movement, 1964

May: Now, I don't much want to review the early development of the

crisis, in which I didn't play much part. It developed, of course,
from the controversy over the Bancroft strip, which I think you're
familiar with and which is available in a lot of places,
particularly the Lipset and Wolin book.' It seems to me, looking at
it now—and maybe then, I'm not sure—that it was a conflict between
two views of what campus freedom is. The administration believed
that free speech on the campus necessitated a sort of political
neutrality and also that it had to be subject to certain rules set
by the administration. The students demanded free speech on and off
the campus without restrictions and didn't think much of rules in
general. So there was a long series of arguments and sessions,
proposed settlements, demonstrations, and so forth.

One issue, for instance, that was never settled all the way
through was what was called the mounting issue: whether it was
permissible to organize on the campus actions that turned out to be
illegal when they got off the campus. Now in all this period up to
the day of the car and the day of the big sit-in I watched closely,
but I don't remember that I played any particular part before that
time.

Lage: Were you aware of other faculty getting more and more involved?

'Seymour Martin Lipset and Sheldon S. Wolin (editors) The Berkeley
Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations (New York: Anchor Books, 1965)

121

May: Oh, very much so, and particularly in the history department.
Anything more about that?

Lage: No, I would hope to talk a little bit more about that later.

May: All right. Then two absolutely electrifying incidents changed the

course of things. The administration had arrested some students for
infractions of the rules that it had set. They were in a police car
and a great many students surrounded the car, lay down around it,
and various people, including Mario Savio, spoke from the roof of
the car. The police were all set to intervene. And nobody knows
what would have happened if they had, if they'd simply dragged them
away. I'm sure it's a question that President Kerr has asked
himself many times. [light laughter]

Then following an off-and-on effort—and that's important — to
discipline the leaders for breach of rules came the big sit-in of
December 2, when a large number of students walked into Sproul Hall
and Mario Savio, certainly a gifted orator, made his speech about
"throwing your bodies on the machine." Joan Baez led the students
in, as you doubtless remember, telling them to go in "with love in
their hearts."

After Chancellor Strong had come with a public address system
and warned them that they had to get out, Governor [Edmund G.] Brown
sent in the police to arrest them. There were many allegations of
brutality in the KPFA version. On their tapes, people were saying,
"Oh, oh, my head's being banged on the stairs," and so forth, but I
don't think really that there was much brutality then. There was
police brutality later, but these were mostly campus cops and were
not yet embittered.

Now, in these circumstances, most faculty members felt they had
to take a position. Very many felt strongly about the issue of
having police on the campus at all. Not everybody took a position:
some faculty members throughout stuck to their work. And it may be
that they were the wisest: people who never signed anything, never
gave speeches, and went on teaching were not molested. For
instance, Murray Emeneau, the professor of Sanskrit wouldn't even
sign statements against the politicization of the university.

Lage: He just stayed out of it altogether.

May: Stayed out of it. That could be done, but most didn't.

Lage: Were there many in the Department of History that stayed out of it
altogether?

122

May: No, hardly any. A lot of engineers and people in the hard sciences,
but not in history, political science, mathematics, English and so
forth.

Lage: Sociology.

May: Sociology, sure. Yes. [laughter] Some were hostile to the whole
business from the beginning and stayed that way all throughout.
Many were friendly to the movement, having often a leftist past and
certainly being strongly against McCarthyism in the fifties.

There was another silly little factor that made a difference,
and that was President Kerr's efforts to bring about—impose, I
would say--a quarter system, which alienated some people from him.

Lage: Do you think that was an important factor?

May: I think it was a fairly important factor. It seems odd, but some

faculty members thought they could use the movement to get what they
wanted from the administration. They were totally wrong.

Lage: Maybe they sympathized with the students' charges that the
university was a factory. [laughs]

May: Yes, to some extent, to some extent. So many were friendly but

baffled about how far they could go. And at various times somebody
or other would be bitten by the belief that he could move in and
settle things or, as I've said, take over the movement and mold it
to his own purpose. (I'm using the masculine pronoun deliberately
because there were few women.) All of these sooner or later lost
out. Some of them were badly treated.

Lage: By?

May: By the movement. Because they didn't understand it. Nobody

understood it. It was always a changing entity, so that made it all
the harder. I'll say much more about that later. Fortunately, I
was bitten by this early and my activities were intense but fairly
brief.

The May Resolutions

May: In the middle of the night one night, I dreamed up what came to be
called the May Resolutions.

Lage: Were you motivated by the arrests and the sit-in?

123

May: Yes.

Lage: Was it cops on campus, or what?

May: No, it was just that there was an impasse and I wanted to try to

help get out of it. I sent this letter to the whole faculty and the
administration: "In view of the desperate situation now confronting
the university, every effort must be made to restore the unity of
our community and to end the series of provocation and reprisals
which has resulted in disaster. With this purpose, the undersigned
faculty members urge that the following actions be taken
immediately: 1) that the new and liberalized rules for campus
political action be declared in effect and enforced, 2) that all
pending campus action against students for acts occurring before the
present date be dropped, 3) that a committee selected by and
responsible to the Academic Senate be established to which students
may appeal decisions of the administration regarding penalties for
offenses arising from political actions, and that the decisions of
this committee be final." In other words, to take it away from the
administration and give it to the faculty. And these got many
letters of support. Then they were read by me at a special faculty
meeting—you could call it an extralegal faculty meeting.

Lage: On the fourth?

May: On December 3. Eight hundred people were there. They were adopted
with amplifications, mainly sponsored by [Herbert] McClosky of
political science and [John H.] Reynolds of physics, calling for
prompt release of students, condemning police action, and calling
for a new chancellor. I didn't support these.

Lage: You say this was an extralegal meeting?

May: Well, it wasn't a regular meeting. It was a special meeting.

Lage: Of the Academic Senate.

May: Yes, it was called by the faculty themselves.

Lage: Hastily called.

May: Yes, it was hastily called. Then these resolutions were in essence
adopted by a committee of department chairmen, headed by Bob
Scalapino of political science.

Lage: Did you help get that committee together?
May: No.

124

Lage: How did the connrittee of department chairmen come together?

May: It was mainly Scalapino's idea. I think he called it. And I

supported it very strongly. The idea was that all other authority
had pretty well broken down and this was a remaining kind of
authority.

Lage: It's quite a big deal for the faculty to call for the resignation of
the chancellor.

May: Yes, I didn't go along with that. I've already mentioned that I

knew Ed Strong fairly well. From that point on, I participated in
endless meetings — sometimes all night—trying to work out terms to
present to the meeting of department chairmen. These terms were
essentially my early proposals, with an emphasis especially on
immediate amnesty.

Lage: Did you see that as the key?

May: Yes. I think I did. Then on December 4 I held a press conference
with local and national press people, saying I was speaking for the
department chairmen. I have that statement here and I'll summarize
it, but it can be an appendix if you want. [See Appendix]

Lage: Yes.

May: What I was trying to do was to explain to the public why many of the
faculty members to some extent were sympathetic with the students,
starting by saying that, "Of course, faculty members do not approve
of demands for a capitulation or of invasion of buildings — courses
of action that are contrary to all that we believe in." "Then why
did we to some extent support the students?" And that went back to
the Bancroft strip. I said that I didn't know of any violence or
trouble resulting in the past from collection of money or obtaining
signatures .

Then a settlement was negotiated about this which involved
among other things the setting up of a tripartite faculty /student/
administration committee, which discussed these problems for a long
time and unsuccessfully. It didn't work.

Then the Regents accepted the recommendations of these groups
that were negotiating in part, though not entirely. And at a
meeting of the senate, the majority of the faculty defeated an
attempt to take the enforcement of rules about political behavior
from the administration and give it to the faculty. At this point,
the Free Speech Movement was dwindling and losing student support
quite obviously. The student government, for instance, was against
it.

125

Then the administration announced its decision to press for
disciplinary actions against students for actions taken during the
crisis two months before, against the urging of some faculty
members. And while this was not technically a breach of faith, it
seemed to be contrary to the agreement of October 2 and subsequent
negotiations. So I continued my public statement by saying,
"Understandably, I think the students felt tricked." It was at this
point that the biggest demonstrations took place which had ever
happened. There were threats to enter Sproul Hall, no measure was
taken to prevent it, it happened, the governor called in his police.
Then I end, "Now the student situation is a tragic one and the
university seems almost in danger of disintegration. The faculty
feels, as it said in an emergency meeting yesterday, that the new
rules should be enforced, that punitive actions against violation of
university rules in the past should be called off, and that while
the administration should continue to deal with violations of rules,
a process of appeal to a faculty committee should be established--
and it might well be stricter in the enforcement of the new rules
than the administration." And I ended, "No settlement is possible
which does not take account of the strong emotions now influencing
our students and many of our faculty."

That was my major intervention, and it was carried—some of it
--on national TV. Some of my former students saw it and so did
various other people.

Lage: Was this something you worked out just yourself?

May: Yes.

Lage: Or was this for the department chairmen?

May: Well, that's a little ambiguous. I'd thought they'd authorized it,
but some of them thought not, I think. I got a whole lot of mail,
some of it violently hostile. One woman called up and said, "We're
going to get you," and so forth. On the other hand, there were some
statements of support from around the state.

Lage: Were you being attacked by both ends of the spectrum?

May: No, I wasn't at that time being attacked from the left. That came a
bit later.

Lage: These were people thinking you were caving in.
May: Later?
Lage: Yes.

126

May: Oh, yes. I think the left of the faculty didn't support the line I
took there, but they didn't go after me at the time. The right-
wingers around the state did. And also, as I say, I got quite a few
statements of support. That was my really major action.

Meeting at the Greek Theatre

May: Then, after a number of other meetings of the department chairmen,
Bob [Robert A.] Scalapino took over and called for a meeting in the
Greek Theatre for the seventh, at which amnesty and also the new
rules would be promulgated. Both he and President Kerr said they
were very optimistic that this would bring about a new period of
ordered freedom.

Lage: Well, apparently they also worked with the Regents.

May: Yes, they did.

Lage: Did you get in on that at all?

May: Not working directly with the Regents, no, I never did. The
procedure was that each chairman was to report the chairmen's
agreement to his department and so I did. And as soon as I was on
my feet in front of the faculty and graduate students- -

Lage: This was the morning before the Greek Theatre meeting, as I
understand?

May: That's right. As soon as I was up there, 1 sensed that everything

that the chairmen had said was well-known to everybody there because
there were people among the chairmen who reported it to the further
left Committee of Two Hundred, and so 1 had a pretty bad time in
there.

Lage: How did that go?

May: Well, it was rejected. 1 remember Carl Schorske, who was a very
prominent figure at that time, trying to cast a little oil on the
water by moving to thank the chairman for the amnesty, but not for
the rest of it. And as I walked up to the Greek Theatre I
encountered the other chairmen and said, "Well, how did it go in
your department?" "Not so well," they all said. [laughs]

Lage: What were the people in the history department meeting objecting to
about the department chairs?

127

May: Well, they thought it was an illegitimate institution for one thing,
taking over from the Academic Senate, or so they said. It was
designed to support authority of a sort and to leave things as they
were rather than radically change it. The more left of the faculty,
together with the students, wanted much stronger change.

Lage: It didn't deal with that mounting issue, either?

May: No. No, it didn't. So we got up to the Greek Theatre with all the
chairmen sitting on the stage.

Lage: The entire group of chairmen?

May: Yes. Kerr and Scalapino spoke- -Kerr in a most disastrous opening

saying, "In this Greek Theatre which has seen"--these may not be his
exact words--"so many dramatic spectacles, operas--" (loud
applause)-- By the way, we had worked very hard to see that the
people who were arrested were out of jail. They marched up there in
formation, which should have said something.

Lage: Yes.

May: And then as you know, Savio took the mike. I think Scalapino said
this was a programmed meeting with a definite agenda and tried to
stop him from talking. He was hauled off by the cops, came back,
and said he just wanted to announce a meeting later in the
afternoon. And that resulted in pandemonium and the complete and
permanent collapse of anything like this compromise program that I'd
been trying to promote.

Lage: Had you been aware that the police were on hand?

May: Oh, sure. I think so. Well, in the circumstances of that period on
the campus they would have had to be, I think, because there was
every possibility of trouble.

So I was by this time in a state of a good deal of pretty
violent emotion. I left a statement in the department saying I was
still for the chairmen's agreement, then I went to my class in
American intellectual history—which it happened that day was on the
ideology of the American Revolution. So I said, melodramatically,
"The lesson of the American Revolution is that liberty is worth
everything, even life itself, but there is no such thing as liberty
without order and that's all for today." So then I left the class
and Jean met me. I was, I quite admit, in a state of some nervous
crisis, partly from all-night meetings, so she took me driving
around in the countryside, as it was then, near Pleasanton. Contra
Costa County was still a pretty nice place. And then I went home.

128

There's a statement in a recent account, as I think you know,
that said that Henry May, the chairman of the Department of History,
went to bed for a week.2 Well, I didn't, but I did stay home the
next day, December 8. And that's the point at which the senate
passed pretty much a complete endorsement of the student position,
defeating all amendments, including Professor [Lewis S.) Feuer's
amendment to exclude from definition of free speech, speech directed
to immediate acts of force or violence. I think I would have voted
for that amendment if I'd been there.

The victorious majority of the faculty emerged to the students
waiting outside. There were a great many embraces, there were
tears, and so forth. This was the high tide of the faculty-student
phase of the movement.

Lage: And you didn't attend that meeting?

May: I wasn't there. I was back in my office the next day handling

department matters. And for a while I shut up. I had had my day.
And perhaps it would have been better if I had shut up from then on,
but I didn't. As 1 see it now, my effort and the effort of the
department chairmen had been to establish the status quo ante- -to
leave things much as they were, and this as a program didn't have a
chance .

Lage: Too much had happened.

May: Too much had happened and too many emotions had been aroused.

II
Lage: You said that the movement had tasted victory.

May: Yes, the metaphor I used later was that what I thought had happened
was that they had marched around the walls of Jericho blowing their
trumpets. And to their enormous surprise the walls came tumbling
down and they didn't really know what to do next because there was
never a program to take over and run the university. It wasn't a
revolution, in other words.

Lage: Yet they had some pretty clearly defined goals.

May: Like what?

Lage: Being able to advocate off campus--

2David Lance Goines The Free Speech Movement : Coming of Age in thr
Sixties (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1993).

129

May: Oh, well, unlimited free speech, yes, sure. Yes, that they had.
And for the moment they seemed to have achieved these goals.

The Faculty Forum and Faculty Divisions over Student Protest

Lage: I would like more of your reaction to your fellow faculty's actions
and how you saw the faculty breaking up into factions.

May: I'm going to talk about that, if I could, in the next period, but in
general I would say I'd been a bit of a casualty and tended to blame
the organized left of the faculty, and that moved me toward a
somewhat more conservative position for a while. In fact, the rest
of the sixties I was trying to decide how far it did move me and how
far it didn't. That is, how far was my movement to the right to go.

Lage: Was this organized left the Committee of Two Hundred?

May: That's right, yes. My main effort for a while was to keep the

department together. I thought of that as my main job and I think
of it now as my main accomplishment in the whole period. It might
have been better if I'd stuck to that alone and done that job. We
had people on the pretty extreme right and left--as much divided as
any department --and we never got to a point where we couldn't talk
together, do our business, or when we met people weren't speaking to
each other or anything like that. That was what I was working for.

Lage: Tell me how you did that. And I notice you don't mention any names
of people. [laughs] I mean, there were the professional
relationships, there were the friends, and all this spectrum of
political opinion.

May: Well, some of the people on the left, like Reggie [Reginald E.]

Zelnik, I could always get along with very well. Martin Malia, the
most articulate person on the right, was quite a good friend. And
then there were all sorts of people in between. But at meetings,
throughout the whole period, not just when I was chairman, the
department was able to stick to its business, which was still
including making a great many appointments and some changes in
curriculum and that sort of thing.

Lage: Did the different members of faculty try to persuade one another?

May: Well, we tried not to do that in the department. Then another event
that I think is very important- -Delmer Brown organized something
called the Faculty Forum. That was on January 12. This purported
to be just an inqui y ",roup, but it was immediately perceived as a

130

relatively conservative group, which it was. I think from here on
in the Academic Senate there were two sides, approximately equal in
numbers, and I think anybody on either side would also say equal in
academic distinction.

Lage: Did you identify with the Faculty Forum group?
May: Yes, definitely.

Lage: Delmer is a little hazy on dates and all that, but he does very

clearly say he saw the Faculty Forum as a moderate group, and that
there was the more extreme on the right and the more extreme on the
left. Now how did you see it?

May: Well, actually the people on the right supported that group because
they had nowhere else to go. There were very many moderates. That
is, there were two sides as I see it, approximately equal and both
of them internally divided. That is, the Faculty Forum ranged from
right to moderate and, let's say, the progressive faction ranged
from moderate to left.

Lage: I see.

May: Ken Stampp and I after a while found we agreed mostly. I was the

left of the right and he was the right of the left and so we pretty
much agreed. Something I remember at that time was I said to George
Guttridge that I found the liberals just as intolerant as
conservatives, and George twitched his moustache and gave me a look
which said, Henry, where have you been?

Lage: [laughs] Was that a revelation for you?

May: I tried not to think so, earlier, but I certainly completely

accepted it from here on. Now, after that in the Academic Senate I
talked a whole lot — certainly too much. As I see it now, what 1 was
trying to do in my long talks in the senate was to formulate my own
position for myself --usually on a conservative side, sometimes—and
I'll show that later—not. My friend Henry Smith made the remark
that there are always three positions on all issues: the right
position, the wrong position, and the Henry May position.

Lage: [laughs] Now what did he mean by that? That's a great comment.

May: What did he mean by it? Pretty much what it says. The Faculty

Forum—let's say the relatively conservative side— drifted to the
position that we were quite willing to let the students run their
affairs. Let them run the plaza, let them run free speech- -anything
they wanted—so long as the faculty could hang onto control of
teaching and requirements and programs, while consulting students.

131

Lage: Where did you see the administration fit in there?

May: That's why it wasn't a very realistic program because this was sort
of a cop-out--that is, saying, "Let the students handle their own
affairs." In an organization of this size and complexity there have
to be some rules, and the administration's job is to enforce them.
I realize that now.

Lage: What time period are we talking about with the Faculty Forum? It

started January 12, 1965. Are we just talking about the '65 period
or on through- -

May: Oh, no, it went on through the whole works. There were these two
sides pretty clearly defined. Everybody knew all the people who
were articulate at all; everybody knew who was on which side. At a
typical meeting the two sides would be on the phone for a long time
the night before, trying to get out as many as possible of what we
both called the troglodytes — that is, people who never took any part
at all. And when the meeting met, there was always a test motion.
Often it was a motion to let the students come in the hall and sit
at the back, which meant that they would be able to interrupt and
make a bit of noise. Once there had been a vote on that, one knew
which side had been effective in its telephoning and pretty much
what position would be taken on everything else. [laughter]

Lage: Did you have a sense of humor about it at the time, as you do now?

May: I tried, I tried. Oh, I learned. What I learned there was that in
making speeches to a sometimes hostile audience, that you have to be
very calm and plausible and not get excited. And I learned to do
that I think pretty well. Some of my speeches were inordinately
long. And sometimes I'd speak from my seat, sometimes I'd get up at
the front and made a speech. I did a lot of that.

Lage: So you did more than just try to hold the department together?
May: Yes, but I say I think that may have been a mistake.
Lage: I see.

May: 1 might have done better if I'd stuck to the department as my job.
As it is, after two years of this I resigned as chairman. There
were two reasons for this . I thought under the circumstances two
years were enough rather than three, not realizing that the trouble
wasn't over. It waxed and waned and I thought that it might be
over. And I was very tired. Also, I was getting too involved on
one side in certain issues in the Academic Senate, which I'll come
to. I was getting too involved to be able to preserve the neutral
stance I wanted in the department. Anyw&y, I did resign at that

132

point after two years. And people were very nice about it, said
nice things about my chairmanship and so forth.

Attitudes of Key Administration Officials

Lage: Did you have any relationship or opinions about changes in the
administration—Martin Meyerson and then Roger Heyns?

May: First of all, about Chancellor Strong: I'd known him quite well as

an undergraduate because he was a friend of my closest friend on the
campus and used to sit on Mrs. Overstreet's roof to watch games and
so forth. And then he was somebody that the history department knew
because he taught philosophy of history and students were taken to
work with him. I think he was a fairly decent but very limited man,
with much too much of a penchant for petty rules. One time at the
height of the campus trouble as chairman I got a release from his
office objecting to staff members taking different hours for lunches
without permission of a chief campus officer.

Lage: Oh.

May: So he tried, but I think wasn't adequate to it. Kerr, on the other
hand, was astute and very well informed. And whenever I made a
speech that the administration liked, I'd get a little handwritten
note. He had his hand closely on the controls throughout.

Lage: Interesting.

May: But he never understood the movement very well because he was a
pragmatic progressive and a labor arbitrator and always a
rationalist, and didn't have any sympathy for this kind of romantic
radicalism nor, indeed, understand it. At his best, he knew that,
and said once that he didn't, but then he put together a somewhat
different version, I think, after the fact.

Meyerson I saw a certain amount and I never thought really that
he knew what was going on.

Lage: He was fairly new to the campus, wasn't he?

May: He was pretty new, yes. And then Heyns is a large and controversial
figure. My closest faculty friend, Bill Bouwsma, was the vice
chancellor. People said it was because he was also Dutch. And he
admired Heyns immensely. He thought he was pretty close to a great
man. I didn't. But Heyns said at one time that his effort was to
keep the campus open and running one more day. I think that didn't

133

show me that he cared enough about what the campus was really about.
He was good at his job and I'm sure helped get us all through these
years.

Lage: Maybe that's all that could be done at those times?
May: Maybe that's all that could be done.

Lage: Would you have any comments on people like John Searle, who seemed

to go from kind of a student sympathizer over to a more conservative
position?

May: That was part of Heyns's astuteness — to appoint him and also Carl
Schorske, who was his spokesman on the moderate left. His enemies
had called Searle "the chaplain of the FSM," but he became very
conservative and stayed that way.

Radicalization of the Student Movement

May: The next topic I want to talk about is the radicalization of the
movement .

Lage: Okay.

May: The student movement everywhere, not just at Cal, became more and
more radical and more and more violent. This is really not a
controversial statement and one can demonstrate it almost anywhere.
The later movements, ones after Berkeley, tended to be more radical,
culminating in the movement at Columbia in '68, with Mark Rudd and
the Weathermen and so forth coming out of that . The movement of the
SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] went the same way. This was
the national organization that had had something to do with the
student movement all over but I think was never terribly powerful at
Cal, though I knew some people in it rather well. The SDS started
in 1962 with the moderate and very effective Port Huron Statement.
Then it was more and more radicalized and ended mostly taken over by
the Weathermen, who made no bones about advocating violent
revolution and individual direct action.

Something like this happened everywhere and it happened in
Berkeley, too. But I think in some ways Berkeley was more moderate
than some of the places where things heated up later, because people
had had a time to work out positions on both sides. Most of the
movements from then on, through '68, took the form of nonviolent
resistance and stuck to that pretty well. For instance, blocking

134

recruiting for the war on the campus. I'm coming to the Vietnam War
later.

Lage: Right, the issues became more complex.

May: Yes, I'll come to that. And then blocking the Oakland draft
registration in '67--all by nonviolent means, but blocking
nonetheless.

Lage: Right.

May: By '68 it had become impossible for Robert Kennedy, though an

opponent of the Vietnam War, to speak in San Francisco because he
was shouted down, and very difficult for Gene McCarthy to speak on
the campus. Throughout this whole period, it was always very
difficult to say what sort of incident would blow up into a crisis
and what would not . And I was certainly not very good about
predicting that. I didn't, for instance, think that the People's
Park business would.

Lage: What about the Eldridge Cleaver incident?

May: I happened to be out of town during that. It didn't produce
anything very major, I think. There are many reasons for the
change, why they went this way- -I've thought quite a lot about the
national movement and the local movement. For one thing, naturally
the opposition got tougher and so there was a good deal of
frustration. It mustn't be thought that the same people moved from
being moderate and really friendly, at least on the surface at the
beginning, to being confrontational, because different people moved
in and out of the movement all the time. It was a flowing stream.
David Hollinger has pointed that out and so has Reggie Zelnik.

One thing that was determined as things went on was that as the
movement became rougher, it lost its faculty support. This had
usually—not always—been a force for moderation. But mainly I
think the radicalization came about because the student movement
became associated with two major allies: the black movement from
civil rights to black power is one, and the other is of course the
movement against the war in Vietnam. Neither of these played much
of a part, as I can see it, in the early movement in Berkeley.

Lage: In the free speech aspect.

May: Yes, though the fact that some of the leaders had been in

Mississippi and had seen people denied their constitutional rights,
had seen the constitutional authorities acting very violently—that
had an effect, certainly. But neither race nor the war had anything

135

much to do with the movement here, say, from '64 for a couple of
years.

With the first of these, the black movement, I was, I would say
regrettably, not much more than a favorably inclined bystander.
That is, I did not go and sit in in the South or anything like that.
I did begin to learn a little something from some black graduate
students with whom I talked pretty frankly. I opposed then and
later separate black grades, which were given a good deal, and also
appointments based on race.

Lage: Now, tell me about separate black grades.

May: Well, as we got black students admitted, a number of the faculty
were sympathetic and gave them high grades that were not really
earned.

Lage: Was this discussed among faculty?

May: It was mostly tacit. I didn't do that. I had a student once who

had never gotten lower than a B+, whom I gave a D in the midterm and
he was in a state of shock, but he did bring up his grade to a
legitimate B- by the end, so I thought I'd accomplished something
there. He actually thanked me.

Lage: And what about the black graduate students you mentioned --what was
their point of view?

May: Well, one I remember talking to thought that the police functions in
the inner city ought to be taken over by the Black Panthers. Well,
that a very intelligent young man would think this was somewhat
revelatory, but I didn't take much part in that whole thing.

Lage: But did they have an opinion on grading?

May: Oh, the few black graduate students that I encountered were able to
make it on their own pretty well. But there weren't very many of
them; very few. I'll talk more about that whole issue when we get
to the Third World Strike in '69.

Attitudes Toward the Vietnam War and the Anti-War Movement

May: Vietnam I'd like to get to now. That became a major preoccupation
for me, as for most people on the campus. And my lukewarm attitude
toward the anti-war movement cost me some very good friends. I'll
come to what I thought in a minute.

136

For the students, it meant that they were in a much, much more
serious position, because their opponent now was not the relatively
mild university but the U.S. government. They had to decide what
they were going to do—that is, be draft resisters, go to Canada, or
avoid the draft by various movements, such as signing up in a
theological school or various other things.

Lage: Or going to graduate school.

May: Staying in graduate school indefinitely, yes. Although the

government began to blow down their necks more than a little. I'll
talk about that in a minute.

Anyway, I frequently stated that I was sympathetic to all these
student options, but I did not believe in people above draft age
telling students what they ought to do, as for instance in what was
called the Vietnam Commencement, when one hundred sympathetic
faculty stood on the steps of Sproul Hall and had a kind of a mock
commencement. Now, my attitude--! ' 11 try to explain it as I saw it
then and then how it changed. For one thing, I was full of the
comparison to Korea, which we had been through recently. Part of
the difference was that in Korea the United States, acting for the
United Nations nominally, made the decision to try to conquer the
whole peninsula and invaded North Korea up to the borders of China.
This led to pretty disastrous results: it got fought way back to
almost out of Korea and then back up to the middle with a
compromise.

In Vietnam there was never any intention to overthrow the North
Vietnamese government. I was aware of what seemed to me the early
atrocities of the Viet Cong, bumping off policemen and mayors, and
didn't like the adulation of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese
in some quarters. But as usual, I made the mistake of trying to be
in the middle for a long time.

Lage: In terms of a stand on the war.

May: In terms of a stand on the war. That is, was it General [James M.]
Gavin who suggested a "policy of enclaves"--to defend certain
enclaves but not to try to conquer widely outside of them? And then
I disliked communism. I'd been a fellow traveler and I disliked the
increasing violence and intolerance of the supporters. But mainly,
and I think this was very foolish, I found it hard to accept what
was clearly the only choice. The only choice was to give up on
South Vietnam and its government --somehow to force them out- -or to
carry on the war, escalate it to an unacceptably bloody and
destructive level, and even then not win. I think those were the
only possibilities.

137

Lage: Did you see that at the time, or was that what you came to see?

May: No, that's what I came to see. By "67 or '68, I was getting the

point that the only way the war could be won—and it's dubious that
it could even then—was to bring it to an ever more bloody and
violent conclusion. Of course, the My Lai incident shook everybody
quite a lot and me, too.

Lage: Were there other faculty members that you discussed these issues
with that helped shape your views at various times?

May: Oh, yes. Of people you know, Nick Riasanovsky could never support
having one more communist government because he knew a lot about
various communist movements. My very good friends Henry Smith and
Leo Marx were very strongly against the war from the very beginning,
and I had some very unpleasant episodes with both of them.

Lage: Did you maintain the friendships? These were such intense times!

May: With considerable difficulty. Eventually, yes, but they were
impaired and troubled at the time.

Then I switched sides in the senate once. I'd like to talk
about that. It was a meeting of May 22, 1966, on the question of
whether to turn in grades to the government which would then be used
in determining draft status. It was part of the idea of having the
war fought by people that couldn't get out of it, mainly black and
without support, though there were some people who fought in it for
patriotic reasons, I realize that. I hated that and believed and
said in a speech that if we were going to carry it out, the draft
should be decided by a lottery as elsewhere, with no exemptions for
students, and that if we were in the business of grading people with
the knowledge that our grade might send them to the war, that was a
breakdown of all academic integrity.

Lage: Was this a new government policy that the university was being asked
to follow?

May: Yes.

Lage: And the question was?

May: Would we follow it. So I called up the anti-war committee and said
I would like to cooperate with them on this and they were very
cordial indeed [laughs] about that. So I made another long speech
on this business and said I was against cooperation with the federal
government on the matter of turning in grades.

it

138

May: I made a speech about the kind of war it was and by whom it was

being fought and said it was like the policy of European nations at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, when gentlemen could stay
home and the press gang would pick up the unemployables, and that I
thought this kind of policy would have a terrible effect on society
and for the universities, among others. If we were involved in this
selective service process, we'd be involved in constant incidents
involving very deep feelings, so we should do everything possible,
not to sabotage military policy, but to detach ourselves. I got a
quite different set of phone calls [wry laugh] that night from the
ones I usually got—that is, from very different people.

Lage: Were these issues that the Faculty Forum was active in?

May: Most of the people who were in the Faculty Forum didn't take a part
in this. No, I don't think so.

Lage: And this wasn't the kind of thing they would garner support for?

May: No, it was the other side. By this time, the left of the faculty

had been pretty much subsumed in the anti-war committee. By 1969 I
was finally ready to take part in a San Francisco peace march. I
did this in November 1969.

Lage: This was an anti-war march?

May: Yes, it was reportedly anti-war, but by this time it was at least

two-thirds gay rights in San Francisco. Those were the slogans that
people were shouting. There was a big incident on the way—the
first women's incident which I knew about — in which the women in the
march quite rightly insisted on de-sexing the restrooms where people
stopped, because otherwise they had to wait in long lines while the
men went in.

Lage: How did you happen to go to that march?

May: Well, because I went with some of my graduate students.

Lage: Maybe I'm not clear on your making this transition to actually being
against the war.

May: I was against the war when I realized that it either had to be

fought to a terrible end, which we'd already done to a considerable
extent, or we'd have to cut the throat of South Vietnam. That was
what Lyndon Johnson was utterly unwilling to do, and his
administration was wrecked because of his continued support for the
war.

139

Lage: Do you remember the point in time when you came to this decision and
considered yourself anti-war?

May: Only approximately.
Lage: Did we record that?

May: I think we recorded that, but if not, by '67 to '68--quite late, in
other words. Then I took one other anti-war action, which I'll come
to in the part on the climax. So that's what I have to say up to
then.

Graduate Students

Lage: You've mentioned graduate students just sort of in passing. I

wondered--this goes way back to the Free Speech Movement [FSM] but
also since—what kind of interaction did you have with your graduate
students on these issues, starting with FSM?

May: Well, for one thing, this is the time when I did the best graduate
teaching that I've done and had very close relations with a number
of them and never any hostile relations, really, with any of them.
But I want to talk about that more at the end when I talk about the
upshot of the whole thing.

Lage: But did you have graduate students who were active in FSM, from whom
you would get some points of view?

May: FSM was pretty much an undergraduate movement, though there were
graduate students who were leaders.

Lage: In this David Goines book, he quotes quite a bit Bob Starobin as
being a history department graduate student.

May: Oh, yes, Starobin. Yes, well, he was the son of one of the national
Communist leaders, as some of the others were. A very sweet kid, he
seemed. He was one of those who was most violent in his speech,
though not in any other way. When we had the meeting in the
department to put over the department chairman's proposal, he said,
"Can't we all deal with all these things as friends?" Well, that
turned out not to be easy.

But I didn't have as my own student anybody that was in a
leadership position in the movement. I wouldn't have had. That is,
they would not have chosen to work with me. At Cal they were pretty

140

free to choose whom they wanted to worked with. My students were
sort of in the middle, I'd say, on most things.

Lage: I'm interested that you even said, "They wouldn't have chosen to
work with me." How does that work?

May: After a certain point, some American history students worked with me
and Ken Stampp and others with Leon Litwack, Larry Levine, and
Charlie Sellers. One of the things that was good about our graduate
program, as opposed to some others, is that it was a process of
negotiation, almost courtship, whom you chose to work with. Also
the kind of thing I was interested in—intellectual history—on the
whole does not attract social activists.

Lage: I see, so people who have a social activist point of view or leaning
would—

May: Who had it strongly. But on the other hand, later on, one of my
very best students was Charlie Capper, who in this period was a
Trotskyite and very active in that position.

Textbook with Charles Sellers

Lage: You mentioned Charlie Sellers, and we didn't talk about your
textbook, which I hope we will at some point.

May: Oh, yes, all right. Charlie at that time lived a little way up the
hill from us, bordering on the same lot. This was in the summer of
'63. I crossed the back fence. We developed the opinion that
people were assigning these immensely long textbooks in the
elementary course in American history which gave the students no
time to do anything else, so we developed a program of writing a
very short textbook together with just the essentials—economic and
politic essentials— and then a series of Berkeley readings. The
textbook went very well and made a good deal of money, much more
than anything else I've ever written. [laughs]

Lage: Isn't that interesting.

May: A textbook always does, unless its a flop.

Lage: You had mentioned in writings how textbook publishers were courting
professors, but this didn't occur in that way?

May: No, Charlie handled the negotiations. It went to Rand McNally3 and
has changed several times since.

Lage: But you came up with the idea rather than a publisher coming to you?

May: Yes, both of us.

Lage: Now, you were quite on opposite sides on FSM and everything?

May: On everything, yes, but that wasn't clear altogether, yet. That is,
this was in the early stages, when the department was holding
together very well.

Lage: Was the writing of the book or the selection of Berkeley readings
affected at all by different points of view?

May: I don't think so, no. I don't think we had any trouble with that at
all. Eventually I decided I didn't want to go on rewriting my half
of it, which was the recent half, every term and so we turned it
over to somebody else who got most of the royalties. But for I
forget just how many years, maybe five or six, it made a good deal
of money.

Lage: That's interesting.

May: That was then, that was at that time. But usually the department
managed to avoid really hostile relations. I've written about the
department in this period. One time I remember specifically we were
talking about the need for a second person in modern German history
and could hear the tear gas popping and the sirens outside the
window and went right on with the discussion. Usually that was how
it was within the history department. [laughs]

New Faculty Appointments

Lage: I think we've mentioned but not really fully explored that you had
twenty appointments to make during those two years, I think you
said.

May: Yes, something like that. This was partly Kerr wanted to move to

the quarter system and make the summer as big as the other quarters,

'Charles Sellers and Henry May, A Synopsis of American History
(Chicago: Rand McNally, 96°).

142

And that didn't work out. In fact, it was resisted a good deal by
the faculty and the students, who didn't want it.

Lage: But did you still have those twenty appointments?

May: Let's say when I was chairman I learned that if I wanted to appoint
somebody, money could always be found. That's how it was.

Lage: Even in the context of this extreme tension over politics?

May: We could work together on that kind of thing; there was nobody that
one couldn't work with.

Lage: Now, that wasn't true in some other departments.

May: No, it wasn't. I'd say in the long run- -and maybe this should be

off the record—Charlie Sellers did withdraw and cease to take part,
but I think he was the only one .

Lage: What about Franz Schurmann?

May: Oh, well, he was half in our department. I left him out, too, yes.

Lage: Was he more alienated also?

May: Yes.

More on the Anti-War Movement

May: I should have mentioned this under Vietnam. After the '66 affair,
we arranged a public debate — this was after I had decided I was
anti-war--with two anti-war stalwarts, Fred Crews in English and
Franz Schurmann. I wanted to join them in the Faculty Peace
Committee, the anti-war group, and told Jean when I went out that
I'd probably come back a member of that group. But what happened
was that Martin and I made our statements —

Lage: And was this a debate, you say?

May: It was a debate — formally arranged with Franz Schurmann and Crews on
one side, and Martin Malia and I on the other. My purpose was to
take a position against the war, for getting out of it— but I
mentioned that we ought to take some account of the people we'd
persuaded to be on our side, and that was anathema always to the
strong anti-war people. I had a very bad time. That is, the
audience- -whether by planning or not, I'm not sure— was extremely

U3

hostile. We got roundly denounced from the podium and then somewhat
by the audience afterward. And 1 decided whatever position I had, I
couldn't work with those people. That's the other incident about
the war until right at the end. I'll tell you about another one.

Lage: Okay. It must have been very painful, this kind of thing.

May: That was very painful. Yes, oh very. Nobody likes getting a really
hostile audience, and I had that a number of times and it's not
pleasant. Usually in the senate there was a certain amount of
decorum, but people could say fairly nasty things.

Lage: If students were invited into the rear, did that hold? [laughs]
May: Not for long. Not for long.

Lage: Did the faculty further to the left not have any objection to this
sort of muzzling of people's right to speak? My sense of what
you're saying is that people whose opinions weren't respected often
weren't allowed to speak.

May: That's true, but not in the Academic Senate, because that was up to
the chairman and we had pretty good chairmen.

Lage: Not in the senate, itself. But what about other occasions? You

mentioned [Eugene] Gene McCarthy not being able to speak on campus.
How did the faculty who were further to the left react to those
incidents?

May: I think there would only be a few that would defend shouting down
speakers, very few.

Lage: But just maybe were more tolerant of the emotions.

May: That's right and some of them would blame some of it on the
speakers, on what they said.

Filthy Speech Movement

Lage: [laughs] I wanted to get some reaction—and we could save it for

later if you want to continue the point of view—but we didn't even
discuss the filthy speech movement, which does have some important
consequences.

May: I'll tell you what I think about that.

144

Lage: That began March third in '65.

May: Yes. The question was whether in public speech on a campus you

could say the words "shit" and "fuck." By this, the students had
something on their side because both words were being used in the
highbrow press — for instance, the New York Review of Books, or the
TLS [Times Literary Supplement] , and so forth. The faculty who
spoke—like Mark Schorer in English had been very active in defense
of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Ulysses and so forth. So the point
was not an easy distinction to make.

Lage: And they spoke against the use of the words in public settings?

May: Yes, I think the principal consequence of it was to deepen very much
the alienation of the public. President Eisenhower mentioned it:
"So they talk about free speech but this is where it ends." That is
an example, I think, of the ethos of the movement: that it rejected
tactics and did not play to the general public.

Lage: They weren't thinking politically.
May: No, that's right.

Lage: Did it also reflect that the movement had this sort of broader
counterculture element that may not have been recognized?

May: Yes, very much so. By that time, that was taking over in a big way.
And I'll have more to say about that later.

Lage: Okay, good. Let's save that. Now, we've kind of lost where we
were. The last anti-war march in San Francisco was the last
incident we talked about.

May: Yes, okay, that's all under Vietnam. And those two topics— the

black power movement and the anti-Vietnam movement --were pervasive
all during this time.

The Muscatine Report on Educational Reform

May: I'll get to the Muscatine Report then. I'd like to be rather brief
about that because I think quite strongly that my position and
activities were pretty foolish. This was a report by a committee of
nine people, mostly from the moderate left of faculty opinion, which
reported to the Academic Senate in March 1966 and at the same time
published a paperback book for public consumption. I didn't like
that, for one thing, very much.

145

Lage: You didn't like that it was published?

May: Yes. The Heyns administration set great store by it because it
seemed a way to mollify public opinion.

Lage: Just as background, do you want to say something about the

relationship of this report to the earlier events in the Free Speech
Movement?

May: None directly except that the preamble—part of it written by my
colleague Dick Herr--expressed quite eloquently their analysis of
what the students wanted and the books they were reading, and that
part of it was pretty good.

The announced general purpose was to make Berkeley education
more responsive to the needs and expressed wishes of students,
particularly undergraduate students. And as I look at the
recommendations now, they seem pretty mild. Although most of them I
supported at the time, I went over them one by one in a series of
long speeches. Some of the proposed changes were too vague to
understand and a few seemed to me to have the effect of abdicating
faculty responsibility for instruction or lowering intellectual
standards. Whether they did or not, I don't know now, but I think
about these things, this whole episode, as rather foolish on my
part. I took a lot of the time of the senate, and a lot of energy
and time of my own, and the reforms proposed were neither as
important as the committee and its supporters thought nor as bad as
I sometimes made them sound.

Lage: [laughs] Let's try to break down how you felt then and how you
feel, now, too.

May: Yes, all right. At the time, it was clear to me that some increase
in the relative importance given to undergraduate teaching was
necessary and desirable, but I didn't like a change in a relation in
faculty and students that made the students participate in functions
like setting up curricula and forming standards for them. My
position was that, yes, if there's something that the students very
much wanted us to teach, we ought to teach it, but we ought to
decide on intellectual standards and procedures. That was my
position at the time. And I made one speech, I remember, trying to
distinguish between what I called liberal innovation and progressive
coercion. I wanted the faculty not to be coerced.

Actually I think now that this kind of thing is very hard to
effect by changes in the rules. You put the students on committees
--students are such a transient population that within a year or two
they've forgotten why they were on those committees and don't

146

particularly want to be on them. And rules and regulations can only
do so much.

Some change in the relation of faculty and students in the
direction of permissiveness was absolutely inevitable in the whole
climate. I think this is both for better and for worse, but in the
long run, I think the faculty lost no necessary powers. The
relations between professors and their classes depended on the
individual.

I think I sounded in this rather didactic and lacking a sense
of proportion and, particularly, a sense of humor. I don't feel
good about my intervention on that whole business. I don't think it
mattered that much.

Lage: It didn't have long-term effects?

May: Not much. I'll come to that at the end. There were long-term

effects for better or worse from the whole period, from everything.
The relation between faculty and students changed both for better
and worse. It became different. I'll talk about that later.

Lage: But the actual Muscatine Report itself?

May: I don't think it much could be affected by these rather detailed

changes in rules. Some, if I were to go over it point by point now,
which I would hate very much to do, I still might find a few ideas I
disliked, I might find quite a few I liked all right, and a lot that
didn't make any difference. The center of it was the Board of
Educational Development to which students could apply to set up
courses of their design.

Lage: That was the center of your objection?

May: No, I supported that. I voted for it. But then if there were
programs and new courses set up, I wanted the faculty to do it.

Lage: I see. But just to get a little more context—we have the Muscatine
Report, your speeches --what was the reaction in the senate to this
controversy? Were there others who took your side?

May: Oh, yes. Oh sure, there were.

Lage: It was a hot issue?

May: It was much the same line-up as for everything else.

Lage: That's interesting that questions of the educational reform broke
down pretty much the same way.

147

May: Yes, pretty much, with some variation. I think a good many on both
sides had the sense to see that it wasn't that important, which I
did not.

Lage: Okay, that's good. You'd mentioned so much about debates on the
Academic Senate. How much did it matter?

May: Was it sandbox politics?
Lage: Right.

May: Well, yes and no. One symptom is there 'd be a delegation of the
administration there--Heyns and his assistants — and while we were
talking on something of major significance, involving possible
sources of violence or holding the campus together, they would stay,
and when we got talking about academic program matters, they'd
leave.

Lage: Out of lack of interest?

May: Yes.

Lage: Or because it wasn't their place?

May: No, out of lack of interest. And yet, how the faculty felt about

things was important to the whole campus community, important to the
movement which kept close tabs on it, and in some ways to the
administration. It was reported in the press quite often. The
chairman of the senate would have an interview with the local press
and they'd cover it — almost always wrong. Anytime I've had anything
to do with the press on something that I knew about personally,
they'd get it only partly right.

Lage: Makes you wonder why you read the newspaper at all.

May: Yes, so I think, as I've said, that it would have been very likely
smarter for me to stick to keeping the department together mainly,
and not have to sound off on everything that went on. But that was
not to be. [laughs] It was not my temperament, let's say.

Social Relationships in the History Department

Lage: Another question occurred to me while you were talking. We talked
about the social relationships in the department- -the dinner
parties, the formal social occasions of an earlier era. What were
they like in the sixties? Did they continue?

148

May: They did, but mostly social relations were among members of each of
the two sides. Not always, but mostly. Of course, when I was
chairman, I carefully entertained everybody.

Lage: You would invite people for parties?

May: Yes, but normally the two sides were pretty distinct. I remember
once there was a special effort, I think at John Searles1 --I 'm not
sure of this, but Ken Stampp would remember it—when selected people
from the two sides were invited to come in and talk things over.
That happened, but it was rather rare. Entertaining was largely
divided.

Of course I still maintained, sometimes with some difficulty,
my friendship with Henry Smith and with others who were on the other
side.

Lage: Were there just things you didn't talk about?
May: Well, no, we did.
Lage: You did.

May: Sometimes it didn't go very well, but on the whole, I think, faculty
dinner parties go on and on.

ii

May: But I reiterate that in the department there was almost nobody that
I couldn't talk to until close to the end of things.

Lage: But, aside from the political divisions and all, did you still have
dinner parties, as you described in the fifties, that were sort of
formal occasions and following department meetings? Did that
tradition continue?

May: Not so much, I think. No, we were too busy.
Lage: And maybe too big.

May: Maybe that, too. But for instance, when Jean and I went to dinner

at the Bouwsmas ' we would decide whether we were going to talk about
what was going on or talk about something else. 1 will say later,
and I want to emphasize, that the activities of the university were
practically never stopped.

Lage: Oh, you mean the ongoing business?
May: Yes.

149

VII BERKELEY IN THE LATE SIXTIES
[Interview 6: August 27, 1998] it

Lage: Today we're talking about the later sixties.

May: All right. We had gotten to the year of '69. We haven't quite

gotten into the events of that year. In quite a different way from
campus events, it was a bad year for the history department because
of two deaths. George Guttridge, who some of us admired more than
any other older person in the department, had retired to Carmel and
dropped dead walking on the beach. This is a good death and it
wasn't so terribly sad an event, but the other one was the death of
Joe Levenson in a boating accident on the Russian River. That was a
terrible shock. Many of us thought that Joe was the most brilliant
member of the history department. And he was a good friend of mine.

Lage: Was it his brilliance of mind or his force of personality that
people most noted?

May: Both, I think. In one memorial, which I didn't take part in, by
former students and so forth, he's referred to as the Mozartean
historian. This referred to his combination of aesthetic and
intellectual power, but he had also a perfectly colloquial and
unpretentious side. So there were those two events that year.

Third World Strike

May: The first big public event was a Third World Strike starting in
January "69. This was a product of the black activist movement,
which like the other movements of the sixties got steadily more
militant and had repudiated most of its white supporters by this
time. The official manifesto of the strike published in the Daily
Californian asked the whole student body to support a strike
essentially for separate Third World departments controlled by Third

150

World people on and off the campus. I've the document about that if
you need it. [See Appendix]

Lage: Yes, thanks.

May: I was opposed to the proposal of having departments staffed from any
racial group or having faculty and staff of any department connected
with an outside and undefined community.

The main means for enforcement of this strike was blocking the
entrance to the campus. There would be big crowds at Sather Gate,
but one could always push through and nobody got hurt. There were a
lot of drastic threats. One junior department member was told that
if he taught the next day, they would kick his ass and maybe cut his
throat.

Lage: Wow.

May: He did teach the next day; nothing happened. There were threats to
burn the chancellor's house and all sorts of things, but no real
actual overt violence that I know of. Well, some we don't know
where it came from. The main burning happened the first day of the
Third World Strike.

Lage: Is that the Wheeler Auditorium?

May: Yes. The essentials of the third world program were granted by

Chancellor Heyns. I found it interesting that in the Faculty Club
the talk by the faculty was mostly against it, but in the senate
meeting nobody spoke or voted against it.

Lage: Heyns ' s proposal was eventually adopted and I guess approved by the
faculty. Did it include this outside community [in the
administration of the program]?

May: Not officially, but for some that was their understanding. At least
one of the departments, the African-American Department, after a
while became a good department- -nonmilitant and with people of
various points of view in it.

Lage: It eventually went into the College of Letters and Science.

May: Yes. As I say, the faculty talked against this program, but nobody
voted or spoke against it.

Lage: What do you attribute that to?
May: Fear.

151

Lage: Not political correctness?

May: Well, that term hadn't been coined, but fear of seeming to be
racist, I would say.

Lage: I see.

May: I was not a sole voice in dissent because I had a seminar at that

hour, and I always put classes ahead of campus affairs of that kind.

Lage: So you didn't take an active part?
May: No, I didn't take an active part.

People's Park Incident

May: Then the next one of course was the People's Park. I was never good
at telling what would or would not produce trouble. Some episodes
that I thought were dangerous were passed over and some from which I
didn't see any danger created confrontation, and this one was the
strangest of all. You know the story, of course.

Lage: But let's go into it here.

May: Oh, a little bit. There's a patch of land owned by the university

used by student squatters for gardens and encampments. The issue of
property rights came up and also neighbor complaints. There were no
restrooms, for one thing. This little strip became—and to some
extent has remained ever after—highly symbolic really then to both
sides: property rights as against participatory democracy and the
greening of America. Both sides became increasingly and
surprisingly violent in the various confrontations they had about
this issue. The student movement for the first time at Cal became
violent. Before that it hadn't gone beyond passive resistance. And
the other side—the police and authorities— were also violent. I
think because things had just gone on so long and they were fed up.
One bystander in one of the confrontations was killed. It was the
first casualty. And there was for a while a stand-off.

I took no special part in that. From both incidents, I think,
the violence escalated— violence by the students sort of echoing
back from the later movements, particularly at Columbia, which were
much more violent than "64 had been in Berkeley.

Lage: Kent State wasn't until '70, but we had the Columbia incidents.

152

May: Yes, and the very fiery rhetoric in the wake of Columbia incidents
from the Weathermen. Anyway, I saw students --incidentally all
white, as I remember- -running along the second floor of Dwinelle
Hall, smashing all the office windows with clubs. And there were
rocks thrown through the windows .

Lage: This was over the People's Park incident?

May: Yes, and the Third World Strike both together- -but it's hard to
distinguish. But they were white students that I saw doing it.
There were fires that broke out in Wheeler Hall and in the library,
where my friend Bob Brentano had to get out a window rather
uncomfortably. These, of course, should not be forgotten in adding
things up when people are terribly nostalgic about the sixties.
This was an ugly series of incidents.

One shouldn't forget the violence from the other side — from
police called in from Oakland, Alameda, and San Francisco, who had
no sympathy at all with the students and regarded them as privileged
people who were ungrateful. The campus police, who had started
pretty mild because after all what they'd been trained for was
controlling parking and things like that, were by this time sore
also, but not as bad as the police from outside. So there was a
certain amount of indiscriminate clubbing. If you were on Telegraph
Avenue, as a friend of mine was who with his wife went to the
movies, and a police charge started, you couldn't stop and argue
with him. You just got out of the way fast.

There was one incident that hit me, personally. I was teaching
a small graduate course in the graduate humanities room in the
library and the San Francisco TAG [tactical] squad came along
shooting in the air. A bullet went through the window of the
classroom which could have killed somebody in the class. I tried
very hard to get redress on this. I sent registered letters to the
San Francisco Chronicle and to the ACLU. Never was answered. Why?
Well, I think I made a tactical error. I was on friendly terms with
the administration and I told a member of the administration that I
was going to send these letters. No action was ever taken, though
the district attorney did eventually look into the incident. And
it, as you can imagine, had a certain radicalizing affect on me.
[ laughs ]

Lage: I can imagine. What was going on that they had the need to fire in
the air?

May: Oh, chasing demonstrators. It'd gotten kind of rough by that time
on both sides. It's hard to realize now.

Lage: It really is hard to bring it all back.

153

May: Yes, it is.
Lage: And the tear gas-
May: Oh, tear gas was routine by this time.
Lage: And the helicopters that [Governor Ronald] Reagan called in.

May: Yes, that's right. Reagan comes into the story. He was elected in
'66 partly on anti-Berkeley rhetoric and on February 16 [1969]
proclaimed an emergency on and around the campus and sent in the
National Guard with orders to do what they had to do to restore
order. Now aside from the inflammatory rhetoric, I don't condemn
this. The National Guard were better than the Oakland-Alameda
police, who by this time were pretty embittered. They were, after
all, young kids, many of them in the Guard to escape the draft. So
the military took over the campus.

The predicted big day--I haven't got the date, we'll have to
supply it [May 15, 1969] --came when the students were going to make
their move and orators at Sather Gate urged the students to "take
the park," and they moved toward the park. Now, this had been
expected to be a bloody day. And it might well have been.
Actually, there were medical units from the San Francisco campus to
attend to casualties and that brought me a slight role. So far all
I'd done in this crisis was to be one of those who sat in the
basement of Sproul Hall to watch the police, see if they—as
charged- -brought any students to beat them up.

Lage: Was that something that the faculty arranged to do?

May: Was asked to do, yes. Nothing at all happened and the police
brought me coffee and so forth. In an analogous, more or less
neutral act, my action was taken with Larry Harper. Now, Larry
Harper was one of the mildest members of the department—usually
non-political, of the older generation—but we agreed to be on the
streets with armbands in order to direct casualties to the first-aid
stations. So [laughs] I was in a good place to watch what was going
on.

What happened was so much an epitome of the sixties. The
streets were lined with troops with bayonets looking pretty
formidable even if they weren't. At one point I wanted to cross
Bancroft Way and go to my bank. This was a ludicrous episode.

So I asked the nearest soldier please to take me to his
commanding officer in a sort of military sounding way as much as I
could muster and he did. The guy furnished a detail to take me
across the stre< t ' o the bank, with the students cheering ironically

154

and saying, "Watch out for that guy, he's a hippie! Look at that
beard!" and so forth. [laughter] But I was able to go to the bank.

Lage: So you had a beard at the time?

May: I had a beard after I had been on a backpacking trip in '66.

Lage: Was that a statement?

May: Yes, that was supposed to be a friendly statement. So here you have
the students ready to move on the park, but these fixed bayonets
looked pretty formidable, and it didn't happen. Instead what
happened, as everybody knows, was fraternization between the
students and the soldiers, even to the point of sticking flowers in
the muzzles of their rifles. The park was not taken and remained a
sore point and a symbol for a long, long time. And that is the end
of the violence. That is, this was a sufficient show of force so
that there weren't many who wanted a real fight of the unarmed
against the armed, let's say.

Lage: On that episode, at least.

May: Yes, well, I think it's the end of violence.

Vietnam University

May: But more academic damage was done, I think, in 1970 at the time of
the Cambodia bombing and invasion. A group meeting outdoors in the
Greek Theatre proclaimed this a Vietnam campus. They said we were
supposed to adapt all our courses to the subject of the war.

Lage: Was there any Academic Senate involvement in that?

May: No.

Lage: So this was an independent group?

May: Yes.

Lage: Was Professor Wolin the one who was connected in that?

May: Yes, he was just about to leave, for one thing. And I was

distressed to see my friend Henry Nash Smith on the platform looking
very uncomfortable.

Lage: What others were leaders in that?

155

May: I'm not sure. But it was mainly a student movement. Of course, I
was wholly against this episode and this use of the university.
Later, a friend who worked in the newspaper room told me what
happened there. Students came up and said, very excited, "Have you
got any Vietnamese newspapers?" And they had and brought them out.
"But these are in French!" [laughs] It's lucky they weren't
written in Vietnamese.

Lage: Oh, so they were stymied?

May: Yes.

Lage: Oh, that's funny.

May: The history community- -including the faculty, graduate students, and
staff — was meeting at this time and I made the strongest speech I
could saying that to cripple the university wouldn't help at all to
stop the Vietnam War or our participation in it. It would mean much
more to send one anti-war congressman to Washington. In fact, the
more the demonstration against the university, the less sympathy for
the anti-war movement.

So to illustrate, I started going door-to-door with a couple of
like-minded graduate students, presenting a proposal made by some
senator--! forget who—asking I think for willingness to negotiate
with the Viet Cong as well as the North Vietnamese or some such
pretty moderate proposal. It was interesting. We went to a number
of districts. In black districts we were usually received in a
fairly friendly way. The test was the working-class white
districts.

Lage: How were you received there?

May: Well, not too badly. We only got a few signatures, but I was

surprised by how willing people were to listen—much more willing
than many of my colleagues by this time. People would start by
saying, "Are you the guys that are burning down the university?"
And I'd say, "No, we're the guys that are in the buildings when
they're burnt down," and that would sometimes be an all right
opening.

But that blew over. The university was not converted to a
Vietnam University, and with this episode the Berkeley sixties
ended. Most people were exhausted. Do you want me to go over any
of these episodes?

Lage: Well, if you can remember a little bit more about the

reconstitution. Did classes end? Did they go on? How did the
history department respond?

156

May: The history department was not in favor of that.
Lage: I see, so that didn't divide the department?

May: No, it didn't. By this time the faculty, whatever their spoken

sentiments, had grown much more conservative. That is, if you have
your class broken up even once it makes you think a little
differently. And nobody in the department, as far as I remember,
was in favor of changing the whole operation of the university.
This wasn't I think a very strong movement.

Lage: Just to go back to the black studies issue and all that: how did the
historians who were in that area, like Leon Litwack and Lawrence
Levine, line up on that?

May: You mean about the movement for Afro-American Studies department and
La Raza department? And Asian-American and Native American? Ken
Stampp was very strongly against. I'm not sure about Levine and
Litwack, and I certainly don't want to speak for them.

It didn't have a great deal of active faculty support. I
thought that, indeed, we ought to increase study of minorities,
particularly the Afro-American one if the students wanted that, but
I took the same position that I had taken in the argument about the
Muscatine Report, that if it was going to be done I wanted faculty
to set its standards and programs. And I wasn't for connection with
outside groups.

Now I'm looking back from the present. One thing to remember
is that the ordinary activities of the university went on. The only
place where there was any threat really of interrupting it was this
Vietnam University thing. In 1969 I had students say that they
couldn't get to class because of tear gas and rocks, I moved my
seminar home, which worked very well and I kept it there.

Also my own life continued. For instance, between the two
years of my chairmanships, in the summer of '65, the four of us went
to Ireland, had a wonderful time--a delightful country—and left the
vice chairman in charge.

Lage: That must have been a nice reprieve.

May: Oh, it was. [laughter) I recommend it for anybody.

157
Historical Assessment of the Student Movement

May: Speaking from now, I came gradually in an academic way to understand
or to try to understand the typical ideology of the movement. Now,
when I talk about that, I have to be pretty cautious because I'm
speaking for other people and that's always dangerous. And also
there were many kinds of people with different sorts of agenda in
the movement and a typical view was not everybody's view.

Lage: Was there one movement?

May: Clearly not by the end of it, but the ideology proclaimed in '64 and
held by some throughout seemed to me a recurrently familiar type of
romantic radicalism. First of all, people talked a lot about love
and trusting the feelings as against the intellect, heart against
head and so forth. And there was a belief in physical expression of
feelings, as opposed to cautious academic neutrality. Second, an
extreme freedom of individual speech and behavior--from the point of
the view of its opponents, approaching anarchism: a dislike and
distrust of institutions and rules per se, a dislike of competition
as contrary to the value of fraternity, and therefore of grades.
Before this, a belief in instant gratification in contrast to the
postponement of gratification demanded by capitalist ideology from
Adam Smith on. And above all, a radical egalitarianism, which to my
mind is not without its hidden elitism. That is, some people are
more equal than others.

None of this is new. In my opinion it goes at least back to
Rousseau. In America, the most often claimed ancestor I think was
Walt Whitman, who says something like this: "I am neither for nor
against institutions, except the institution of the dear love of
comrades . "

Emerson appealed to the students at this point- -a lot once they
encountered him. He didn't have that good a reputation for those
who didn't know him, but in a class of mine in intellectual history,
when I said of the Transcendentalists that they couldn't succeed
because they had no program—by this time students were answering in
class in a very good way—somebody said, "Look around you in this
class. There are lots of people who think Just that way."

Lage: Somebody said that to you?

May: Yes. One of the favorite poets was Blake, the enemy of commerce,
science, and rationalism.

Lage: So you could see from the way your students responded to the various
veins in intellectual history?

158

May: Sure, oh, yes. And not mainly Marx. There were some Marxists of
course around, but it's too rationalist and too systematic and so
forth. In the movement in Paris, which had its correspondences and
its differences, they cited Berkeley a good deal. Theodore Zeldin,
in his book on the French, talking about the youth revolt there, has
this to say: "To be unconcerned by hierarchy and prestige, to lose
interest in the problems of the class struggle, in the distribution
of wealth and power, and in politics as a whole implies a greater
rejection of adult values than to be left wing." At least those
students who are left wing are willing to play these adults at their
own game. In other words, the movement there—and I'd say here—was
starting a new game.

a

May: Another thing I thought the movement had a lot in common with,
though it was not certainly a conscious descendent of this, was
American revivalism. The series of revivals, particularly in the
nineteenth century, that swept through American religion had this in
common with the movement or movements of the sixties: that they're
terribly powerful, almost irresistible, when they start, but they
haven't much staying power and don't have a clear goal of how things
are supposed to be afterward. They can't be negotiated with or
limited with precise rules. When various churches tried that, they
usually lost out, at least temporarily. And they're bound to
produce, eventually, extreme behavior to the point of violence, as
revivalism did.

Lage: I hadn't been aware of that, not knowing a whole lot about American
revivalists.

May: Well, it's one of the big currents, and in the earlier period was
popular and often democratic, rather than, as some kinds are now,
fundamentalist and in that way conservative.

Lage: But as it progressed, it became more attractive to sort of dangerous
types? I mean, did that happen in the religious revivals?

May: Yes, there "d be efforts at coercion and very violent manifestations
of that—people barking, falling to the ground, all that sort of
thing—and a great deal of hostility to learned clergy particularly.

Lage: I see, you can see counterparts there.

May: Yes, they're there. It's an analogy, that's all.

Lage: But were there analogous social conditions? Did you give thought to
that?

159

May: No, I wouldn't exactly say that. The early nineteenth century's
awfully different from the middle twentieth.

Lage: Hard to compare.

May: Yes, but the methods and to some extent the results—particularly,

the fact that this sort of movement is almost irresistible when it's
on the right turf, but it can't make institutions very easily. And
indeed, one of the main characteristics, I think, of the student
movement was that it wasn't revolutionary because it never had an
alternative government. The students didn't have a program really
for running the university. They sort of seemed to imply that it
didn't need running.

Impact of the Student Movement on Social Mores and Campus Culture

May: Now I'd like to talk a bit about the effects on the campus and on

middle-class society, and perhaps just a little on the effects on me
since this is an autobiography or oral history.

Lage: Absolutely.

May: Institutionally the campus was not much changed. There's some
loosening, both good and bad--a little less stiffness of
institutions, grade inflation. But the structure of the American
university which had grown up in the late nineteenth century and
which my former student Larry Veysey has pointed out is unlike any
other—that is, departments, courses, degrees, and so forth—didn' t
change much at all.

Lage: We've heard so much about grade inflation. Did you have a chance to
observe how that happened or why? Did it have anything to do with
Vietnam?

May: Well, there's that particular reason, yes. I supported withholding
grades, but not as a part of this egalitarianism. I remember one
young man on the faculty in the senate saying, "I can't relate to
students through grades." That perhaps says it a little bit. But
the reasons for grade inflation varied and you could resist it if
you wanted to.

Lage: Do you feel like you resisted it?

May: Yes, I did. Another thing that did change was the general practice
of student ratings of professors, and that of course had the effect
on some people- -not on everybody- -of wanting to make them a little

160

easier on the students. Some of the young faculty who had grown up
in the movement tried to remain radical in the later period, but
they were likely to be pretty conservative when their privileges
were involved.

Lage: You mean in the later period of the seventies?

May: Well, yes. The students continued to be excellent and I would say
livelier than they had been. There was somewhat more communication
between faculty and students for obvious reasons.

Lage: In the classrooms or out?
May: Both.

Lage: How did your actual classroom change? You used the term "friendly
combat" somewhere.

May: Mighty little except that there was more discussion back and forth
even in lecture courses, and I encouraged it more. What was really
important, I think—and this is such a subtle business it's hard to
talk about—was the changes in middle-class society that came about
partly through the influence that sons and daughters on the campuses
had on their parents.

The biggest change was in sex attitudes and rules. This, I
would say, was revolutionary. That is, when I was at Harvard and
was assistant senior tutor in one of the houses, one of my jobs was
to enforce the proprietal rules of girls visiting boys in their
rooms. Then they had to have the door open, the roommate had to be
present, all this. In the seventies at Harvard, I was surprised
when I went back for a visit that there was everybody living next
door and obviously there was no attempt whatever to control sexual
activities. Hard on some people, but that was a very big change.
And it happened earlier in Berkeley than in a lot of places. I
remember Jean talking about one of her friends whose daughter came
back to Berkeley from somewhere else because she said here her
boyfriend could walk right in the front door with no pretense.

Lage: [laughs]

May: Then also, drugs. Now what's the connection with the movement? I'm
told by friends who were associated with the student movement that
quite a few people in the movement had at some of the all-night
meetings both their first sexual experience and their first
experience of drugs. I can't vouch for that myself, but it was
there on the fringes of the movement from the start and indeed has
been there on the fringes of other movements of its kind that I've
talked about in history.

161

Lage: In the revivals?

May: No, not there, but in the romantic radical movements there was often
a bit of this. The changes in middle-class society are a part of
big social change that's so big that I don't know how to talk about
it. It needs, and has not yet found, a first-rate social and
intellectual historian to talk about these changes of the sixties
going on into the seventies as a whole. It's a very difficult thing
to do.

Lage: Has anyone approached satisfying that requirement?

May: Not that I know and I've been through the bibliography pretty well.
The book by Burner1 on the sixties is good on politics, civil
rights, Vietnam, actual episodes, but not as good I think on these
subtler effects, which really everybody who lived through the period
and was around before in a university community or in middle-class
society knew.

Lage: So the facts are there. You don't think we need to develop more
source material? Or is it the analysis only that's missing?

May: Facts about political movements and facts about social changes--!

don't know the bibliography of that as well, but it's certainly been
written about a good deal. But I don't think there's a single good
book on the whole movement and its consequences . If there is , I
don't know it. Irving Howe, I think, is about as good on the
sixties as anybody, from the perspective of somebody who was a part
of the movement of the thirties. He's pretty understanding, I
think. But nobody's done that big job. And to do that kind of job,
to talk about the social changes of any period, is an immense
undertaking.

Lage: Are we too close, do you think, for someone to undertake this?

May: No, I think the time's about right. I think there'll be more and
more writing on the sixties. Now, what comes after this is that
these social changes didn't apply to everybody and there are lots of
people who were against the whole thing—the student movement, the
war protest, drugs, sex, everything. So one of the sharpest
legacies, I think, is a continuing drastic division in American
society between the permissive middle class and the socially
conservative working class, which has dogged our politics ever
since, and particularly has been the hardest question for the
Democratic party to answer.

1 David Burner, Making Peace with the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996).

162

Lage: Why is it a class division?

May: It's a very good question. Why, I don't know, but families are
stronger among a good many immigrant societies, particularly the
older ones, and there's a dislike of people who are seen as
privileged and not appreciating the privilege. None of the
political or social movement took account of this. That is, it's
part of their whole makeup that they were seldom ideologically
practical or pragmatic and didn't care whom they alienated. For
instance, most Southerners, the military and veterans, and
particularly the immigrant working class were very hostile. It left
the society so divided that it's not easy for it to function, I
think.

The stereotypes of the university continue after the radical
realities have pretty much past. That is, if I go somewhere else-
let's say, on a cruise- -people ask the conventional question, where
are you from? The resulting expression makes it clear that Berkeley
has still a definite connotation, even though now the university is
quiet and by no means radical.

Impact of the Student Movement on Self and Other Faculty

Lage: I don't want to take you off your track, but I did want to ask if on
the campus among the faculty was there a legacy of bitterness? I'm
thinking about how long the loyalty oath division seemed to have had
an effect.

May: Oh, there are residues, sure, but for one thing feelings change a
lot over time. There were very few who supported the radical
students all the way in the later period. There was certainly a
resentful conservative minority throughout that stayed that way, but
on the campus, in at least the departments that I'm familiar with--
and I can't speak about others—the climate has been one running
from certainly mostly verbal radicalism to a Democratic liberalism,
let's say.

Lastly, I might say something about the effects of the sixties
on me. I think the effects of the whole business on me were good
much more than bad. For a while, I and other academic intellectuals
were educated by events more importantly than by books. And that I
think is desirable. Emerson says, "Books are for the scholars' idle
moments."

Lage: But you hadn't thought that before, I would bet, or had you?

163

May: I never thought that. Exactly. But I always thought that your
whole experience went into your books, let's say. But I'd been
educated by the sixties and I think had learned how easy it was to
get things wrong. I think that I learned to speak much more easily
in public and express myself more. My communication with students
and with younger people in general was better. I think this is true
on the whole campus. There's a certain sense that we've been
through something together and come out more or less on the other
side, I think, in quite large parts of the campus.

Lage: So in that sense it was unifying.

May: Yes, so in that sense it was unifying. Oh, I think it was. One of
the effects was that the people you knew were not necessarily the
people in your department, but the people with the same political
views either in the long run or in individual episodes. That is,
people you called up to try to get on your side and the people that
you were with in the arguments in the senate and all this sort of
thing.

Lage: Did the Faculty Forum continue throughout this period?

May: It continued throughout this period but not any more as far as I
know. The same with the Committee of Two Hundred; these were ad
hoc.

Lage: Right, but that was one way that the people with views you shared in
other fields came together?

May: Very much so, yes.

Lage: What about effects on your approach to writing about history or
thinking about history? You've alluded to things.

May: Well, about the sixties particularly, everybody felt from the
beginning that they were having an experience that made them
understand revolutionary periods. This wasn't a revolutionary
period and comparisons with the big revolutionary periods are rather
absurd, but nonetheless one learned if one didn't know it before,
that movements change and get out of control pretty easily, and that
written programs often aren't much use and don't much matter. And
then I guess, if people had been studying Aristotle's politics,
they ' d know that out of extreme democracy comes anarchy and from
there the strong arm, though it didn't get to that stage. But
people compared the movement when they first experienced it to
whatever they knew about in their own field.

Lage: Carl Schorske compared it to something in Germany and Italy.

164

May: Oh, sure, to the 1848 movement. I thought one of the accurate

comparisons of the administration's actions in the early days was to
the Kingdom of Naples, one of the worst governments in Europe, where
the king was likely to grant a constitution one week and then the
next to put all the leaders of the constitutional movement in
prison. What happened here was an experience, to put it in its
least terms, when things got out of hand and were unpredictable.
And that's a very powerful experience for anybody to go through--
particularly people who believe in and live in institutions. You
didn't know what was going to happen.

Lage: The sense of order was lost.

May: Yes, it was lost—off and on. One should always remember that this
country is the only major country that has not, in the twentieth
century, undergone real revolution, invasion, or even large-scale
bombing. That partly explains why comparatively minor upsets like
this one upset us so much.

Lage: I was struck by the sort of apocalyptic language in some of your own
speeches and writing. You mentioned the university's being in
danger of disintegration. That was in the press conference in
December of '64. Then in '70, let's see, what did you say? "The
survival of the university is in question." That was in the Moses
lecture.

May: It seemed that way.

Lage: Was that a fairly common stance or perception?

May: I think so--on the far left and not always just there.

Lage: So it was also a shared vision with the far left, you say?

May: Yes. There were only a few that hoped that it would be destroyed,
but there were those who wanted it to be very radically
reconstituted.

Lage: But also there were those who felt that the world was crashing down
around them.

May: That their world was, yes. And of course some people left.

165
Faculty Departures from the History Department

Lage: Tell me more about the people who left. I have a little list from
history of people who left, but I don't know if they left for those
reasons. Who were the people who left? Annin Rappaport?

May: He was more pushed out, but in the ordinary course of things.
Lage: He went to UCLA, did he? Or to another campus?

May: It seems to me to Davis. I'm not sure. [Rappaport went to UC San
Diego in 1967--ed.]

Lage: Do you have anything to say about Thomas Kuhn leaving?

May: Tom Kuhn left because he could get a more satisfactory position at
Princeton.

Lage: And that was before the unrest.

May: Yes. Then Carl Bridenbaugh left, I'd say, because he had devoted

himself to running the changes of the fifties and improvement of the
department and after he'd made it such a good department, he
couldn't control it any more.

Lage: [laughs]

May: So far, there's very little to do with all these matters.

Lage: Right, I know.

May: Now, I don't like to speak for people—what their motives were.

[Henry] Rosovsky was very important in the early mediation moves,
and I think that one could say that his departure was connected with
the movement.

Lage: Which side was he on when you say mediation?

May: He was trying to mediate and bargain and so forth with the FSM.

That usually shifted people in the conservative direction. And then
he became of course a very influential dean at Harvard. You haven't
mentioned Marty Lipset or Nate Glazer. Those two I think left for
somewhat ideological reasons. Louis Feuer certainly did.

Lage: These were not history department members.

May: No. Then after Bridenbaugh was at Brown, he attracted there quite a
number of facilty: Bryce Lyon and Robert Padden and Perry Curtis.

166

That was our government in exile. So some left for all sorts of
other reasons. And, of course, Bill Bouwsma left.

Lage: He did?

May: Yes, to Harvard—then fortunately came back. But this was when he
was Heyns's vice chancellor and he felt rather repudiated,
particularly over the ethnic departments issue--! think that's the
main thing- -but then came back. I know, personally, that a number
of those who left, whom I've talked with later, always felt a great
deal of nostalgia for Berkeley.

Lage: And for that period?

May: Not so much—for Berkeley as it had been in the fifties.

Lage: What about Hunter Dupree?

May: All right, I can give you that. He had had a running argument with
Tom Kuhn and things hadn't worked out, but he was very much a
favorite of Carl Bridenbaugh and so eventually followed him to
Brown.

Lage: Was he a conservative on the political spectrum, too?
May: Yes, on the whole.

Lage: All right. This is going way back to FSM. This "mounting" issue-
did it ever get resolved?

May: I don't think it did.

Lage: It seems to me it's part of the removing the university from acting
parentally.

May: That's right. I don't remember it coming up a lot. I think in '68
the movement to block the draft board had a lot of other people
beside Cal people in it. I just can't tell you whether there was an
effort to crack down on the sources of that. That was one of the
many issues that I think kind of went by the board. Well, of course
in the People's Park, if on the campus you're telling people to go
take the park, that more or less comes under that, perhaps.

Lage: But that was handled through the courts, though, not through

university discipline, I don't think. The courts tried that man and
I think cleared him.

May: Did they?

167

Lage: Dan Siegel.

May: Yes. Yes, I did know that.

Generational Politics II

Lage: Before the tape flipped off we were talking about the generational
aspects, which you said were so obvious maybe they're not worth
mentioning.

May: No, they're so obvious that they are worth mentioning probably.
Remember the slogan of "Don't trust anybody over thirty."

Lage: Right.

May: It's a part of the egalitarianism. Certainly there was a decline of
deference and a belief that faculty are no more able to do the right
thing in setting curricula or devising courses than students. I
think it comes under radical egalitarianism more or less. And it's
perfectly true that students can be more honest and more intelligent
than the faculty. What I always stood for was the difference in
function. But 1 think there were those who believed in a great deal
of fraternization with students and almost definitely moving to
their modes. For instance, the faculty mode of dress changed a good
deal during this period. Before, jackets and ties for teaching were
regarded as almost compulsory. In the past they had been compulsory
when I was in college, even for teaching assistants. That went, and
insignia of rank went.

Lage: Now what would be the insignia of rank?

May: Different clothes and then different speech in a way, also.

Lage: You mean between student and professors?

May: Yes.

Lage: Not between the ranks of the professors?

May: Oh, well, no. That's all theoretically equal there, though you're
not actually equal to somebody who has been to a meeting you didn't
attend, deciding whether you're going to be kept on. [laughter]

Lage: Right.

168

May: I said at one point when I was being cantankerous in a meeting

called by Richy Abrams of the history department to talk about the
developing crisis—this was pretty early—that I thought that
universities had to be both hierarchical and elitist. I was being
provocative.

Lage: Now why did you want to be provocative?
May: I don't know. Original Sin.
Lage: [laughs]

May: I think any student movement anywhere is a generational movement.
But I think that this all was adjusted perfectly well through and
after the movement. That is, the relation between a particular
professor and his students was less protected by rules of hierarchy,
but they still are formed by respect on both sides, I'd say, and
that became clearer and worked on the whole very well.

Lage: Did it change? I guess not, from what you're saying. But for

instance, your relationship with a graduate student that you worked
closely with, was there much change?

May: A little better communication, but no. For instance, you went to
first names before they were finished, or I did. Some did not.

Lage: But in terms of the intellectual relationship?

May: It's always been pretty good, I think. I don't think it changed
very much. That is, I don't think students are ever reluctant to
express opinions except in lecture courses, and it got so that in
the lecture courses I was teaching I demanded more feedback from
students in class.

Lage: So you initiated that?

May: Yes.

Lage: Not just responded to it?

May: No. I don't know, maybe just responded to it first. That's a

matter also of generation in another sense. As you get older, the
probability of actual confrontation or challenge from students
becomes less likely, except in extreme circumstances- -for it
certainly did happen. You don't have to differentiate yourself from
the students as a young instructor does.

Lage: I see, so that you can relax a little more.

169

May: Yes, that's right.
Lage: That's interesting.

The Margaret Byrne Chair and Outside Offers

Lage: We never talked about your getting the [Margaret] Byrne chair in the
department and then the fact that you had an offer from Wisconsin.
Let's start with the Byrne chair in history. How did you get that?

May: I got the chair because Carl Bridenbaugh left and I was considered
by my colleagues the next in line. That's what I would say.

Lage: That was a simple matter.

May: 1 think that was. About those chairs, Kenneth Stampp has said very
well: "It's not that they mean so much to the people who have them,
but they sometimes mean a lot to the people who don't have them
sometimes." [laughter]

Lage: Oh, that's interesting. What comes with having a chair, besides the
title after your name?

May: Well, normally more money.

Lage: But not in terms of salary, is it?

May: It was, yes.

Lage: Oh, well!

May: But salaries went up during this period in terms of offers from
outside and I didn't play that game.

Lage: What about the offer from Wisconsin?

May: At a certain point, the worst point in the period, when I was most
depressed and frustrated, say, early '69, I started putting feelers
out. I thought that I would like to move, halfheartedly, and I got
offers from Wisconsin and Minnesota. Those were the only ones that
I could drum up. And I was very conscious I didn't really want to
go.

Lage: You knew that at one level or on all levels?

170

May: I knew that at one level. This was just sort of an angry gesture

and I got over it. The only other offer I ever had came much later
from Cornell for a very fancy salary- -the ones they have in the New
York system—and I turned that down immediately. By that time, I
knew I was staying at Cal no matter what. I never mentioned any of
these to the administration until I decided not to accept.

Lage: Do you remember when the Cornell came?

May: A good deal later. Seventies sometime, I'd say.

Lage: Now why do you think that you didn't want to go?

May: Because I like it here. [laughter]

Lage: In the midst of all this! The town or the gown?

May: Both. And it's awfully cold in both Madison and Minneapolis. Also
in Ithaca.

Lage: The climate.

May: Yes, the climate and while I think those are all distinctly first-
rate universities, the intellectual climate, too.

Lage: So even in the midst of this sort of apocalyptic thinking, you had
some sense that things were going to get better, I would guess.

May: I would say I had some sense that some things were okay as they
were. I think my teaching during this period—and I should have
said this earlier, talking about consequences—was better than it's
ever been.

Lage: In terms of you as teacher?

May: Yes, in terms of me as teacher. I had awfully good students and the
upheavals didn't affect my relations with people in my seminar at
all, I think.

Lage: When you talk about your teaching are you thinking of the seminar or
the larger course that you taught?

May: Well, both. I haven't mentioned this but when I tried to teach
History 17 again it was not a success. My lecture course was
American intellectual history and then I brought in American
religious history, though this is some distance ahead. Those went
rather better, rather more freely, with rather more discussion, and
--I hate to use the word—but they were rather more participatory.

171

That's later, that's the seventies, so it's not relevant to your
question.

What was good here? Well, I had deep roots in the place, of
course many friends — some of them off the campus — and I didn't
really want to leave. That was sort of a momentary alienation.

Lage: Maybe an insurance policy.

May: Oh, not consciously, but maybe.

Lage: How about Jean? Was she content during this period?

May: I've asked her that recently. Yes, I think she found it exciting
and wasn't much injured by it.

Lage: Except having to help you-- [laughter]

May: Having to pick up the pieces once in a while, yes.

172

VIII BERKELEY IN THE SEVENTIES, PUBLICATIONS, AND RETIREMENT
[Interview 7: September 10, 1998] it

Pitt Professor, Cambridge Univer s ity

Lage: Today we're talking about the seventies and maybe getting to the

eighties. We won't rush. So let's start with the way you conceive
of it.

May: At the beginning of the seventies—or almost--! had a radical change
of environment. I was invited to be in Cambridge, England for a
year as Pitt professor. The job there was to lecture on American
history. I went in as a moderate conservative from Berkeley.

Lage: In your own mind or in their minds?

May: In my mind. They didn't know anything about how I stood on that,
and Cambridge turned me almost into a flaming radical, but I
suppressed it because it wasn't my turf.

Lage: Tell me a little bit about how that happened.

May: I was a member of Pembroke College. As a professor, you're inducted
as a fellow, just as if you were going to be there for the rest of
your life. You can vote on everything such as clerical livings that
the college owns, whether to build showers or baths, anything you
want.

Lage: Even as a visitor!
May: Well, I was a fellow.
Lage: I see.

May: And this was a small conservative college. They couldn't have
treated me more nicely and I enjoyed a lot about it, but the

173

difference coming right from Berkeley at that time was startling.
For instance, there were at that time no women in almost any of the
colleges except for the two exclusively for women. One time I asked
another fellow, who was a mathematician, "Now, supposing there was a
national or international mathematics meeting here, could you not
invite a female mathematician to lunch at the college?" The answer
was, "Not in Pembroke. Not in my time."

Lage: [laughs]

May: There was a sit-in by students. The issues were that they wanted to
have less emphasis on the tripos — all-or-nothing exam--and a little
more opportunity to do library research. More dangerous, they also
wanted to be allowed to take more meals outside of college. This is
dangerous because their not very good food paid for the excellent
food of the dons. [laughter]

Lage: Oh, I see. Did the dons acknowledge that?

May: Well, they certainly knew it. I got various commiserations about
Vietnam, that they fairly understood what a terrible bunch we were
up against. I was also instructed by the reaction in the college to
Bloody Sunday in Ireland, where I think sixteen people were killed.
The first person 1 talked to said, "This is a terrible thing to
happen. It might bring discredit on the army." [laughs] I
realized I was in a still-intact establishment. That is, it was a
matter of course that high court judges dined in their college. It
was just assumed that they all had a college—Oxford or Cambridge--
and army officers often dined also.

Lage: They just were incorporated into the--

May: Yes, although the admission of students was entirely democratized.
I remember one faculty wife, a don's wife, when the students were
making this pretty mild protest, saying, "They ought to be glad
they're here. Lots of their brothers are down in coal mines," and
so forth. Well, this is a bit of a caricature.

There are also wonderful things about Cambridge- -great
brilliance scattered around and immense beauty, particularly in the
springtime. I think I handled the year badly because I should have
relaxed and learned more and not reacted critically. Really the
reason for that was that I was deep in my book on the Enlightenment1
and couldn't do much on it there, though I did some research in
London.

"The Enlighteiment in America. New York: Oxford University Press,
1976.

174

Lage • Because you couldn't do your research there?

May: Not much. A lot of undergraduates elect to read American history,
but it was not creatively taught and the library resources were
quite poor.

Lage: What was your role as teacher there?

May: Negligible. That is, I gave lectures on American intellectual

history. Very few people came- -that is, they got fewer and fewer.
Every visiting American has the same experience because lectures
play a very small part in their program, and particularly, they
think that the tripos will examine what their own faculty tell them
and not some outsider. Actually, we double-crossed them because the
department invited me to contribute a question on what I'd been
talking about. [laughs]

But I think I handled the year badly; I thought I should have
relaxed and learned what I could and not fussed about it. Anyhow, I
was glad to get home. And nonetheless, we had some wonderful times,
particularly continental travel.

Lage: Did your children go?

May: Oh, sure. Each of them visited- -one with her boyfriend and one with
her husband, but it was mainly the two of us.

Lage: So that was when? '71 and '72?
May: '71 to '72.

Impact of Affirmative Action on Faculty Appointments

May: When I got home, things had settled down since the sixties. The

movements that survived from the sixties, as far as I can see, were
the women's movement, affirmative action- -mainly for Afro-Americans
--and gay rights. I played very little part in any of these.

In terms of the department, I had a general surviving prejudice
in favor of appointment strictly on merit, though I was perfectly
willing to go along with a choice of women or minorities when and if
the candidates are equal. They're never exactly equal of course.
The department was under pressure from the federal government during
at least part of this time.

Lage: Well, the whole campus was.

175

May: Yes, but I wasn't in campus affairs anymore; I'd gotten out of that.

Lage: Yes, I just didn't want to give the impression that it was focused
on the history department.

May: You're quite right, yes. I remember there was a big fight when Bob
Brentano was chairman because they wanted access to confidential
records of our meetings and we wouldn't give it. The department
then- -speaking only for the moment—dealt quite easily with the
women question because there were lots of well-qualified candidates.
So there wasn't a problem after they started making any effort to
appoint women. And anyway, more women were becoming graduate
students.

Lage: Was there a change in how the jobs were advertised or how informal
networks worked?

May: Oh, is that right, yes. They were advertised publicly instead of
being purely on the old boy network, which they had been in the
fifties. About gays there was no great problem because well before
the government, there was a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude.
Nobody inquired.

Lage: In the department?

May: In the department, yes. Only with the Afro-Americans was there some
difficulty because there was not, and never has been, a large pool
of qualified candidates. I think the reason for this is that the
ablest black students go into things where they can make more money
and have more prestige. But anyway, that was hard. It always has
been somewhat difficult to find the right candidates.

Lage: Could you describe what kinds of measures were taken in that
direction?

May: It was necessary to prove in making an appointment that there wasn't
any minority candidate.

Lage: Oh, I see, that was built into the process.

May: That was, yes. That was pressure from the outside. Anyway, there
were people in the department that very much wanted to have a black
colleague. And usually we managed one after a while, but that's
been difficult right along.

Lage: Right all along the way.
May: Yes.

176

Lage: Do you remember pressure from above? Was the Bowker administration
pushing minority appointments?

May: I don't remember that, but I wasn't as active as I had been in

department affairs. Yes, certainly there was some. And you'd have
to make the case more strongly to the budget committee- - that ' s where
I think it came from mostly—to show that there wasn't a candidate
who was one of the minorities. It was hard. And actually- -well,
I'll come to that—some of my own students who were white males
suffered very much from this. They didn't want to be a special
class.

Completion and Reception of The Enlightenment in America

May: My main concern was finishing my book, The Enlightenment in America.
I'd been working hard on that book since 1963-64, when I was living
near Harvard in order to use the Widener Library. This was a big
undertaking because I hadn't been anywhere near that field. I
started by reading the European sources. I remember that Locke's
Essay Concerning Human Understanding took terribly long. I read the
English and French thinkers. The Germans didn't at that time cut
any weight in America, in part because so few people knew German.

I started learning the European sources and also learning the
bibliographical procedure and research tools of early American
history. In most departments, absurdly I think, there's a complete
division between the early American historians up to the revolution
or the constitution and afterward. The early Americanists regard
their specialty as pretty esoteric and I had to be familiar with all
that. And Harvard was a wonderful place to do that.

As opposed to the period when I was working on my last big
book, The End of American Innocence, this time I could get time off
and subsidy pretty easily. I shifted my seminar onto early America.
That was an immense help, as seminars always had been to me.
Actually, my organization, which is the basis of this book and its
main contribution, occurred to me in a seminar meeting.

My problem was that I simply couldn't see all the figures that
were certainly part of the Enlightenment in Europe or in America as
part of one movement. Say, Voltaire against Rousseau— Rousseau1 s
more of a revolt against the philosophes than part of the movement.
Gibbon and Hume in England are pretty much real skeptics as against
the very popular latitudinarian bishops. Adams or Madison — or still
more, the arch-conservative Gouverneur Morris against Jefferson or
particularly ?aine. Yet all these seem to me quite clearly parts of

177

the Enlightenment in some ways. So I had to do two things: to strip
my definition of the Enlightenment to an absolute minimum to include
all those who for any reason believed in the use of the powers of
the human mind rather than in revelation or intuition. Then I
established four categories: what I called the moderate
Enlightenment—mostly British and making various rather ill-fated
compromises with Christianity—and then the skeptical Enlightenment,
going clear off to Hume, who was skeptical of the mental processes
and comes around almost to a romantic position that the passions
really rule. There is first the moderate Enlightenment, then the
skeptical Enlightenment, then something quite, quite different: the
revolutionary Enlightenment- -because you can't be a skeptic and a
revolutionary very easily; you have to be a believer in something--
and finally what I called the didactic Enlightenment, which was the
Enlightenment tamed down for defensive educational purposes in
America.

In other words, this was a very difficult undertaking. And I
paid a high price in time and effort for shifting my field so
radically, when most historians who knew my work at all thought I'd
go on and do the 1920s.

Lage: Did you say why you shifted your field? What drew you to this
period?

May: Well, one reason—like climbing Everest— was because it's there.
That is, almost nobody had tried to write a book on the
Enlightenment in America, particularly- -not for a very long time.
And second, I was tired of the people I'd been working with. When
people asked me that I said, "In the eighteenth century you meet a
better class of people." [laughter] And I enjoyed it. I don't
regret that at all.

Lage: Was there a particular encounter you had with an Enlightenment
figure that encouraged you to study the movement?

May: No, except I'd been lecturing on them in my intellectual history
course all this time.

Lage: Of course, because that covers the whole time period.
May: Yes, sure.

Lage: Now one other question: you mentioned the help from the seminar in
getting the idea for the organization. How does that work?

May: Just talking about it in the seminar, it occurred to me and I went
home and wrote it down. That's how things do occur, I think, in my

178

kind of history. That is, you don't know just why. I always told
the people in the seminar that.

With the help of a very good research assistant, at the same
time, I published a quantitative summary of the books that were in
American libraries that covered a series of four periods. And we
did I forget how many libraries. We published that in a
periodical.2

Lage: Oh, I see.

May: I also tried very hard to give absolutely full scope to American
social history, which was burgeoning at the time, to explain the
differences in the society and why things mutated a bit. I made I
think a tactical mistake in the introduction. I said that I had
first thought about it being about the Enlightenment and religion,
but I finally thought rather the Enlightenment as religion, and that
of course led to its dismissal right away by some.

What I meant was that, in my opinion, thinkers of this period
always started their social or critical thought by a discussion of
human nature and what it was like. Most of them, even pretty
skeptical ones, even if it was a negative theory, they started
there, which seemed to me a quasi-religious start.

As for the reception of the book, the tight circle of early
American historians tended to be hostile because they didn't like
people coming on their turf without their credentials—who hadn't,
that is, been trained that way from the start. The reception was
especially good in England and in Germany and among American
historians of eighteenth-century Europe. I was very pleased at a
long, highly favorable review in The New Yorker. And finally, the
book won two prizes: the Merle Curti Prize in American Intellectual
History and the Beveridge Prize for the best book in history of the
Americas of the year.

Lage: Those must have been very gratifying.

May: Those were extremely gratifying- -very much so.

Lage: Did the early American historians ever come around? They sound like
a very conservative group.

May: Well, some of them were there from the start. Bob Middlekauff was
extremely supportive and encouraging. And with him on your side I

2Henry F. May and David Lundberg, "The Enlightened Reader in America,"
American Quarterly (June 1976).

179

don't think you have to worry about the eighteenth-century people
too much.

Lage: It's interesting that he is now moving his time period forward. I
think he's studying Mark Twain.

May: Oh, yes. Yes, he is.

Religious Studies Program at UC Berkeley

Lage: I wanted to ask a little bit more about teaching religion at

Berkeley. You chaired a committee in '70, '71, I think, in the
department, maybe, on religious studies?

May: No, that was a Letters and Science College committee, and feelings
on it were very much divided.

Lage: Was the idea to have a department or a program in religious studies?

May: I was in favor of having a department. There was a department at
Santa Barbara and so you couldn't say that it was impossible in a
land-grant or a state university. It was absolutely assumed, of
course, that it had to be neutral in views. And there was a
compromise. There were some appointments made, but they were all in
existing departments.

Lage: What were the objections?

May: Well, there are people who object to the teaching of religion in
general, who associated it with dogma and regarded it as obsolete
and all that. I remember a distinguished scientist saying to me
that study of religion couldn't have any interest because you
couldn't prove anything.

Lage: [laughs]

May: You could prove what people said; that's what you could prove.

Lage: He probably felt that way about history, too.

May: Well, probably. More or less. But anyway, what emerged was this
compromise and there were some very good appointments. Then Bill
Bouwsma started teaching a three-term history of Christianity.

Lage: That's what I was wondering.

180

May: I audited it one time. There's a lot of very good teaching of

Buddhism and Hinduism scattered around the university, so it became,
I think, an important place for people interested in history of
religions to come.

Lage: So it did have an effect?

May: Yes. And in my classes, as I say, my trouble was only with the
evangelicals.

Lage: What did the evangelicals object to?

May: Well, neutrality—that not enough weight was given to the

possibility that what Christianity taught was absolutely true.

Lage: I see.

May: That is, biblical literalists, who can quote texts at you pretty

well. I lectured on Judaism and Catholicism, of course—never had
any trouble with either Jews or Catholics about that, though my
knowledge was very superficial, particularly of Judaism. I did a
lot of reading, but that's a subject that's immense in itself and
now also has an endowed chair on the campus .

This was a much more receptive place for religious studies,
particularly than Harvard, which has always held the Divinity School
very much at arms length. It was also good at Yale, but we became,
I think, one of the good places to come for general study of
religions—not just America, of course.

First Soviet-American Historians Colloquium, 1972

May: I was invited to be one of the five people who went to the Soviet
Union to meet with the historians in the Soviet Academy the first
time that that happened—it became annual— and that was quite a
fascinating experience.

I learned how things were organized. People lived in very
considerable luxury— more than American academics.

Lage: The historians?

May: Well, the academics in general, but they took exactly the topics

they were told to take. For instance, somebody would be working on
the Ford strikes of the thirties and they'd go to great lengths to
get him all the wall-newspapers and all sorts of sources, but he

181

didn't necessarily know anything at all about American history
outside of that. Or they'd be working on a particular movement in
Latin America but not look at the colonial period of Latin America.

Lage: How did you discover this about the way they chose topics?

May: We had these discussions with them. And then also we were taken

around by very charming and pleasant graduate students and I ' d ask
them all sorts of questions. Everybody was tremendously cordial.

One time when the discussions had been pretty tough in the morning,

there was a party in the afternoon where we had caviar and good

wines from the Crimea, lots of vodka, lots of everything. It was
sort of as if they were trying to make up.

Bud [Bernard] Bailyn and I were both invited to speak at the
Moscow State University and we got front seats at the ballet. We
would go into a gallery to see pictures — there was a big exhibit of
pictures from the whole of the eastern zone from all the Soviet-
influenced countries—and there were lines going around several
blocks, but we were shoved in at the beginning right at the start.
It was like that all the time. I realized that next time, when they
came to the United States, they couldn't do that—it would cause a
riot. [laughter]

Lage: Yes. You said the discussions were tough. What kind of interchange
was it between the two sets of historians? Were there arguments?

May: Yes. I started out by saying I was a bourgeois historian in two
ways— of the middle class and also I was from the middle class.
That was clear, there's no objection to that, but they wanted, for
instance, to compare figures from the Russian Enlightenment with the
figures from the American Enlightenment, which comparison didn't
work very well really— different definitions and so forth. But it
was a fascinating time.

Of course, we went from Moscow to Leningrad by the crack train
and I took an extra day off for the Hermitage, one of the very
greatest museums in the world. When we met the head of the Lenin
Library, their equivalent of the Library of Congress, he was a
medievalist and very easy to talk to. People in less controversial
fields were easier to talk to than people who were in recent
history.

Lage: I can imagine. You wouldn't face the same kind of pressures.

May: No, that's right. The pressures were quite obvious. For instance,
one thing that had to be accepted was that the secretary of the
association had been there for the preliminary discussions, and one
of the people that he discussed just wasn't available and he didn't

182

talk about that. I tried to send books to the students who'd taken
us around—very innocent, non-controversial books on American
history- -but I don't think they ever got there.

This was during the Nixon administration and when I skipped the
official entertaining one night I went to a restaurant where I'd
been before. I found myself talking to two teachers who had
English—were there for a great treat— and they were full of praise
for the Nixon administration and the possibility of detente.

Then I went to Poland because one of the topics of a meeting in
Poland was the Enlightenment. And that was almost a more
fascinating experience. Poland was still under Russian control, of
course, but you could be pretty sure that any of the academics you
talked to were not only anti-communist, but particularly anti-
Russian. There's the great palace of peace and culture— something
like that— that the Russians had presented in the usual Soviet
style, and one of the jokes was, "Where's the best view in Warsaw?
It's from the top of the tower of peace and culture because that's
the only place you can't see the tower." [laughter] But people
when they wanted to talk confidentially walked down the middle of
the street. Again, there was a certain amount of caution but far
less than in Russia.

Another topic of the meeting was the churches in the period of
Nazi domination. People from various countries were just beginning
to be able to talk about that, and it was very illuminating. The
churches had had very hard choices to make when it looked as though
Hitler had won the war, which it certainly did about 1940. And so
what do you do? Do you try to save what you can of the situation or
do you go into retirement, or do you just shut up? That was
wonderfully interesting to listen to.

Lage: People were talking from their personal experience?

May: Yes, indeed, including Germans and people from other countries.

Lage: Very interesting.

May: We went to the Catholic university at Lublin, which was about the
only non-state university in the Soviet zone. It had pretty close
relations with Catholic universities in the west, particularly
Louvain. And while there I went to Majdanek, a big death camp near
there. There was a bus taking you there. Majdanek was a really
shattering experience— very well-preserved, all kinds of mementos.
Some of the people we were going around with were German professors,
so this was extremely poignant.

183

We went on a bus tour of Poland after the meetings in Warsaw.
And the greatest thing there was the city of Krakow, which is
immensely beautiful—an Austro-Hungarian eighteenth-century city--or
older- -with an awful lot of a kind of baroque I'd never seen before.
So this was a most exciting and illuminating time.

Lage: And not many people went to those countries at this time.

May: No. Well, there were tourists to Moscow, yes. That is, there was a
cartoon in The New Yorker. I think it was, "Are you going to Moscow?
No, not this summer, there are too many Americans." [laughter] It
was like that. There were lots of Americans, yes, sure, but not
getting this red carpet treatment.

Decision to Retire in 1980

May: So this brings me to my decision to retire. I decided to retire for
both negative and positive reasons. I think I had some of the best
graduate students I ever had in this period, and I had the fun of
teaching a new course in American religious history organized
absolutely from scratch. It got a fair number of students of all
sorts of views.

Lage: You mean within the class?

May: Within the class. My whole style was much more welcoming-
introductions and discussion- -which is partly the influence of the
sixties. But also it happens I think when you get a bit older; you
don't have to worry about maintaining distance from the students,
you have to worry about the other thing: communication.

Lage: You noted some place where I was searching through your life that

you started out that class with discussion at the beginning. Do you
remember that?

May: Oh, yes, I think I did, and stating my own religious position. I
felt I had to do that.

Lage: But I mean discussion at the beginning of each session and then the
lecture.

May: I think so. Well, I'd sometimes stop in the middle. Anyway, it was
less rigid and I enjoyed it very much and had good students in this
field.

184

But for the first time I was having difficulty getting jobs for
my graduate students. And this is a very distressing thing. If
somebody has been working with you for, say, five years and there's
no light at the end of that tunnel, very bad things happen. One
thing that happens is marriages break up- -it takes too long, and
then no job, and so forth. And people got seriously depressed and
frustrated.

Lage: Yes, and you feel a responsibility it sounds like?

May: Oh, yes, indeed. Everybody does, I think. The reasons for this, I
think, were first there was a decline in jobs in history in general
and second, the prestige was in social history and definitely not in
intellectual history, which is alleged to be elitist. I tend to
think that that itself is an elitist position—it implies that
ordinary people have no minds.

Lage: [laughter) Yes, it does, really.

May: These are the negative reasons. But also there were a lot of

positive reasons — things I wanted to do. So I retired at sixty-
five.

This was also made possible by the fact that I'd had a sizeable
bequest from a very rich and rather picturesque relative on my
mother's side, Sir Arthur Chester Beatty, who was originally in
mining in this country, spread his activities all over the world,
and fought the Guggenheims on equal terms, and was a friend of King
Leopold II of Belgium- -which is no recommendation.

Lage: [laughs] Right.

May: But we met him in Ireland. My sister and brother--my sister,

particularly—knew him rather better, so he left each of us a chunk
of money. Not enough by any means to make us rich, but I left just
before very large increases in salaries, and this made it so that we
were not rich but okay for money. And I've never regretted retiring
early.

Some of my students when I announced I was going to quit did a
wonderful thing. They rented one of the two camps at the Bears'
Lair3 and put on a three-day celebration. It was the best party of
any kind I've ever been to. The main organizer was Sam Haber, with
a number of excellent assistants.

3Lair of the Bear— California Alumni Association camp in Pinecrest,
California.

185

Lage: How fun! Inviting back former students?

May: Everybody who had been in my seminar was supposed to be invited. A
few faculty members, including the Bouwsmas, came and our close
friends the Murchios were invited and they came. I don't know how
much it cost each participant--! think it would be a couple hundred,
anyway- -because Jean and I didn't have to pay. But they had very
good food, including champagne one night. The guides took people on
hikes, and the staff of the camp was there. And one day was for my
students reading papers and being criticized. That was so that they
could get grants to go there and make it into a seminar.

Lage: [laughs] I see.

May: But this was seriously done and these were supposed to be put into a
festschrift, but that never came about.

Lage: Well, that must have been wonderful.

May: It was. It was, as I say, in all sorts of ways the best party I've
ever been to. And when I get depressed, I think about that,
[laughs]

Lage: Was it in the fall of the year?

May: Yes.

Lage: It must have been just off season for the Lair of the Bear.

May: Yes, and because I'd retired early, I was perfectly able to go on
all the hikes and so forth — much better then than later.

Retirement Years; Academic Symposia and Travels Abroad

Lage: Okay, then let's go on to retirement.

May: All right. My early retirement was very active, indeed. I made it
more or less a principle to accept invitations to go places, take
part in meetings, give papers, which I had not done before. And it
was a time of very extensive and intensive travel, sometimes on
academic business.

Jean and I traveled a lot. To celebrate my retirement, we went
on a tour of India and then we went to Japan. I went to Japan
twice — to a meeting in Japan as well as as a tourist. The meeting
was ver r interesting in Hokkaido because it was Japanese

186

Americanists—many of those were Christian—and that was
disproportionate to the small number of Christians in the
population.

Lage: So it was mainly Christians that showed an interest in American
culture?

May: Not all, but a lot. And I found how very important this country had
been to Japan in the nineteenth century. The university I was at
was founded by an American and the missionary influence had been
very great, and to a considerable extent we were the country they
wanted to emulate. There was a very clear ambivalence in the
present. The experiences by both sides at the end of the war were
similar—that is, finding that the other people were not nearly as
bad as they'd been painted.

Lage: Were these things talked about?

May: Oh, yes, very freely. Then we went to Italy several times and
finally spent five months in a village in the wine country in
Provence, from winter into spring- -February through June.

Lage: Oh, this sounds very lovely.

May: Yes. Not only did we have a fine time— our happiest time overseas
ever —

Lage: Now, where was this?

May: At a town called Cairanne, halfway between Orange and Vaison-la-

Romaine— a district full of Roman ruins, but a one-crop wine place-
not the greatest wine and big over-production, but a nice place to
be. We were in a courtyard of a vineyard owner and had visits from
most of our friends and family- -one daughter and one grandson. But
also in Cairanne I finished my book Coming to Terms and the
environment may have affected it, I don't know.

Lage: So you did do some work over there.
May: Yes, in addition to a lot of play.

Genesis and Reception of Coming to Terms
Lage: Tell me more about Coming to Terms .

187

May: It's an odd book and oddly received. I had a long struggle with

myself and discussions with others whether to write an autobiography
or a study of my father and finally decided to do both and play one
against the other. A couple of reviewers said that it had achieved
a new form. Most reviews were favorable; just one was really
hostile.

Lage: In what publication?

May: In the American Scholar. The AHR [American Historical Review] was
strongly favorable. The main thing was I had much the best
correspondence I'd had from any writing, both from people I knew and
people I didn't know, and so that pleased me a whole lot.

Lage: What kinds of comments were drawn?

May: Oh, comments on my father's personality as I'd presented it and

comments of people who'd had very similar experiences all the way
through. It just goes through really up to the end of the war and
with a little bit on the time before I got to Cal and then stops.

Lage: What drew you to write about this?

May: Oh, I don't know--egotism, no doubt. [laughs]

Lage: Was it something you'd been thinking about?

May: Yes, and I'd been thinking about my father a lot. The great

advantage I had there is that there was a large cache of family
papers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including--
coincidences are amazing—funeral services preached over ancestors
by exactly the people I'd been working on academically. That had a
lot to do with it. And then I'd had some difficulties getting along
with my father and wanted to understand him better. I wrote a good
deal about my mother, too, in it. The letters were mainly from
people who had the same experiences, sometimes remarkably close, or
were personally interested in one way or another. However, the
University of California Press, which decided to publish it with
some internal division, for its own reasons would not publish a
paperback when their small edition went out of print. So it's my
only book to go out of print quickly.

Lage: That's too bad.

May: And there 've been many inquiries about it.

Lage: Did it help you kind of lay to rest some of these troubling things
about your father?

188

May: Oh, very much so. That was what it was about and that's what the
title means.

Publication of Collected Essays

May: I published in 1983 a collection of essays called Ideas. Faiths and
Feelings [New York: Oxford University Press, 1983], which were all
things that had been previously published throughout my whole
academic career. I don't think I need comment on them because I've
commented on some of them elsewhere.

Lage: As we've gone along.

May: Yes. Rather more interesting I think is the book I published in

1991 of essays called The Divided Heart [New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991], meaning divided between Protestantism and the
Enlightenment. All the essays there were recent but one. That was
my introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Old Town Folks, which I'd
written in 1964 in Ireland—took a great crate of books along,
[laughs] I seem to like to write--

Lage : Away from home !

May: --away from home, yes. And one was in a new form for me--an essay
on my friend Henry Nash Smith, which was done entirely from
interviews. We met once a week or more often, I guess, in the
Faculty Club, had a carafe of wine. I asked him questions — did not
use a recorder, but scribbled and then wrote it out when I came
home. He approved the outcome and, with reservations, so did his
sister, who was a little more critical of it. [laughs] But that I
had fun with.

Lage: This must have been a nice experience also because you've mentioned
this sort of strain that this time period put on your relationship.

May: Yes. That helped to restore it and it was mostly okay up to the
time of his very tragic death by automobile accident.

Then in 1993 I published Three Faces of Berkeley.'1 That was
really a lighter job and an awful lot of fun. I did research in the
Bancroft in the papers of faculty members of Wheeler's Berkeley--

Three Faces of Berkeley: Competing Ideologies in the Wheeler Era. 1899-
1919 (Berkeley, CA: Center for Studies in Higher Education and Institute of
Governmental Studies, 1993).

189

turn of the century. And those are marvelously preserved and
indexed, with the letters cross-indexed and everything one could
want.

Lage: I think they did a lot more detailed indexing those days.

May: Oh, yes, and introductions and so forth. They were interesting and
the period is just before my earliest memories in Berkeley and I
remember some of the people who were still alive. I came to the
conclusion that there's an awful lot to be done with the rather
special social history of Berkeley in that period and later, which
is part of what drew people here. It was a very self-contained
community, of course, even in my youth up through high school,
because it was such a long way to the East that people didn't go
very much. Only a few went every year to conventions, so the
faculty had their own discussion and poetry clubs and so forth.

Lage: Now, who will carry on that study, I wonder, because I agree with
you, it's fascinating.

May: I don't know, but I'd like to talk to somebody who's going to
because I have some suggestions.

Friendships, and Avocation as a Painter

May: That's all about my publications. Now, going on about my

retirement, I'd like to say a word about my friends—certainly one
of the main reasons why my retirement has been on the whole a happy
time. Because I've lived here for so long and have a number of
really close friends, both in and out of the university. I won't
list them, but I'm grateful to them, and for them.

I think one of them, Ken Stampp, deserves a special word. We
had always been good colleagues, though differing at times on
policy. After we were both retired we started having lunch together
about twice a month, and these lunches became times for amazingly
frank and helpful discussions. We sometimes start by reciting in
detail our various old-age symptoms. The we go on to discuss family
problems, politics, personalities, pretty much everything. Ken, on
the campus, was often regarded as stiff and uncommunicative, though
not by people who knew him really well.

Another thing that's been a help in my retirement has been a
fairly serious avocation—painting.

190

Lage: Yes, tell how you got into that. Or is that a long-time activity
for you?

May: Well, that was going long before I retired. It started not with my
party at the Lair of the Bear, but a summer visit there when there
was a young woman teaching Japanese Sumi painting. And I liked that
and I went on experimenting, taking courses. I took a lot of
courses, but the best was private study with a man named William
Gaw, who was in his eighties at the time, I think. He had been head
of the department at Mills and was an awfully good painter. He was
also chairman of the committee on art of the San Francisco World's
Fair of '39 to '40, which gave the first prize to Braque, which was
pretty far out for San Francisco, at that point pretty conservative
about the arts.

Lage: Oh, yes.

May: He was himself a very able painter. He had a very fine one-man show

shortly before he died. And what he taught me was technique, which

isn't taught very much. I had had some classes in oils as well as
watercolor.

Lage: Acrylic?

May: Acrylic, yes. But I liked watercolor partly because it was so fast;
as opposed to working ten years on a book, you worked two hours and
you knew whether you got it or not. And then in another two or
three hours it's done. [laughs] At least, that's how it is for me.
Or maybe leave it around a week and play with it. And that gave me
enormous pleasure.

When I was chairman during the worst of the sixties, I went
down once a week to Gaw's very quiet house and garden on Josephine
Street and we painted for an hour and he'd say, "Well, they're
having quite a time up at the university, aren't they?" That was
all. He didn't care about it. And we'd do a fuchsia, or a bottle,
or whatever was around, and he also would criticize what I had done
between lessons, so that was a lot of fun. Eventually, I had so
many around I tried to sell them and had a few shows in a local
restaurant and finally one at the university—sold a very few. But
I was a serious amateur, I worked pretty hard at it, but I'll always
be an amateur, I accept that.

Lage: I gather you still paint quite a lot?
May: Yes, still do, and enjoy it enormously.

Lage: Did you paint while you were in France during that five-month
period?

191

May: Yes.

Lage: That must have been a nice setting.

May: Yes, that was fun. Of course, in that district particularly, it was
kind of hard because of the people that have painted there before,
Sort of like painting in Venice. I want to mention one more thing
about my retirement. I hesitated whether to mention this, but I
think I will. About when I got to be eighty, I had a brief but
fairly severe depression. I think this happens to a lot of people-
in fact, I know it does—right when they realize that they haven't
got much more time and it probably won't be very good. And it was
for a while semi- incapacitating. My excellent doctor, John
Swartzberg, who I got from Ken Stampp, sent me to a very good
psychiatrist who works with old people mainly, though also with
adolescents. I went a few times and found it very helpful. And I
think within six months I was past this.

I say this because 1 like to tell other people that this
happens and that you can get over it. My generation is a little bit
unused to getting professional help for that kind of thing. Younger
people take it for granted. And I'd recommend it to people. I
think it's a good thing. I still go and see the man maybe once a
year to talk about myself but also about younger members of my
family sometimes, and I find it helpful.

Lage: And you didn't have to take medication?

May: Yes, some medication- -not a lot.

Lage: Good, I'm glad you brought it up. I think it's important, too.

May: Yes, all right. Good.

Lage: In finishing, are you going to mention two nice awards: the Berkeley
Citation and the OAH [Organization of American Historians]
Distinguished Citizen Award?

May: Oh, well, I hadn't particularly planned to. The Berkeley Citation
was brought to me by Bill Bouwsma at that Lair of the Bear
celebration.

Lage: Oh, that's a very nice time.

May: Oh, yes. And the other startled me but of course was pleasant to
get, quite recently.

Lage: In '97.

192
Reflections on the Craft of History

Lage: Could you talk about your thoughts on history? I found your
introduction to Divided Heart. "Faith in History," quite an
interesting essay.5

May: That introduction is, I think, the main time I tried to write what I
thought about the writing of history. A funny thing has happened.
It used to be that speculation, discussion about historiography and
philosophy of history was pretty rare and rather frowned on. Now
it's a roaring river, so much so that I think it's too much. I
think that people sometimes write more about historiography than
they do about history, which I don't find a good idea. And I think
that some people make the mistake of thinking that you have to have
figured out exactly what you think about the validity of historical
research before you can write, and that means sometimes you have
great difficulty in writing at all.

In the seventies and eighties, all the bright graduate students
were reading Foucault and some of them Derrida and were questioning
whether there was any such thing as any sort of reality, not only to
historical research but to all mental processes. It's an old
question, as old as Hume, anyway. And that particularly affected
literary scholars.

Historians tend to have more confidence in what they're doing
because you can be so many kinds of historian. You can be a very
objective and old-fashioned diplomatic historian, you can be a
social or economic historian. Intellectual history is a little less
immune to this sort of problem. And what I try to say there is that
you have to take a chance. It's certainly true that you can't write
anything that is valid in an objective sense or valid for everybody.

Lage: You can't talk about definitive history of this or that anymore.

May: No. You certainly don't understand your own motivations completely
and so you have to do the best you can, assuming there's not going
to be any perfection. I've always told people in the seminar trying
to write a piece of history to do a lot of research and get it
really in their consciousness and then do something else—take a
cold bath, go for a long walk, whatever they wanted to do to get
away from it--and something will happen. It'll organize itself for
the purposes that are needed, not in any definitive way.

5The Divided Heart: Essays on Protestantism and the Enlightenment in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

193

Lage: Something happens almost unconsciously.

May: Yes, something happens. As in the case of the The End of American
Innocence, after working a long time on the twenties, I got my
sudden intuition- -the idea that there was something in common in
many fields in the period right before the war, and that a lot of
the important changes began then.

H

May: I don't want to be pompous here and talk too much about what I have
learned because it's a very tentative business. I believe that you
have to do a lot of deep research or else the thing just doesn't
look right or smell right when you've got it done. You've got to
get a feeling for another period, which I think can only be done by
intensive work. But unlike what social scientists do, you don't
formulate questions and start in to get answers. The questions
come, I think, best as you come along, and it comes out differently
than you expect. This makes it take a long time, but I think it
gives it vitality.

What you have is a person and a historical period or episodes,
and these are two equal parts. That is, as a writer of history, you
bring to bear all kinds of experience that you've had. Of course,
everybody's is different, but my point is here that nothing's ever
irrelevant. Anything that is interesting to you or affects you or
moves you in any field at all, or just in life itself, has something
to do with what goes into your writing of history. To use an
example of a pretty empirical historian, say, with Kenneth Stampp,
it's not entirely what slavery was like, but how a deep study of it
impresses somebody with his particular upbringing and social
opinions. It always has to be like that.

One of the good things about the sixties here was that for a
while academics were being influenced not by books but by experience
with other people. That brings to mind what Emerson, a very
scholarly man, said: "Books are for the scholar's idle moments." I
wouldn't want to go that far, but this experience of learning a lot
from a day's happening was illuminating to whatever you were
thinking about.

Lage: Was this acknowledged across the board?

May: I think so, yes. That's all I have to say, at least now, about
history.

Lage: Just to think where some of these ideas may have formed themselves,
you mentioned that there was a retrospective on The End of American
Innocence.

194

May: I just described there, as I have to you, the process of writing the
book at that time.

Lage: How was that book looked at in 1989 after so many years? Did this
new generation get something out of it?

May: Two of them said so strongly. One, somewhat older, was a bit more
negative. But I got a lot of pretty good feedback—not so much
about the subject matter as about the method of the book.

Lage: What would the later generation have done differently?

May: Well, I don't know. It probably would have been less literary.

There's a chapter or two where I try to bring in the social history
of the period, but it probably would have been less literary. They
probably would have been less elitist. This book, rather more I
think than my Enlightenment book, is mostly about intellectual
leaders, and most of them came from pretty upper-class backgrounds.
Some said there are not enough women in the book. There are some,
particularly I think I say something about Margaret Sanger that has
some interest, and some others. I think I would later have tried
harder to find more. Of course, there's not a great deal on black
people and one could have said more, but I think they're more
important in the middle twenties, probably. I say something about
them, but—

Lage: So these are kinds of reflections that you got from them?

May: These are the kinds of things, yes.

Lage: That must have been an interesting experience.

May: Oh, sure. Well, it was. As for other conclusions, I said, you

quoted this, that the best periods in my life were the early forties
and the sixties. And I think that's because in those periods I was
both emotionally and intellectually stimulated more than any other
periods.

Lage: And kind of in the same breath—emotional and intellectual—it
sounds like.

May: Well, somewhat, yes. Somewhat. Though there was no emotional

crisis as big as getting engaged and married in the second period.
But that was connected also with other things that were going on
then. And both of them rather were for me very political periods.
They were the periods I was most politically active. If there's
another period when I think I learned something it would be with
Phib Group 12 in the war, but that was more experience of relations

195

with other people and with new circumstances than very specific
intellectual stimulation.

Lage: Would these be periods that you would want to have as a continuous
occurrence, or are you glad it only happened twice?

May: Couldn't stand it. [laughter] Couldn't stand it.

Lage: Very intense.

May: Yes, that's what I think now.

Lage: Well, I think you've wrapped everything up very beautifully,
especially in connection with your essays and books.

May: Well, good. And I thank you.

Transcribed by Amelia Archer
Final Typed by Sara Diamond

196

TAPE GUIDE --Henry May

Interview 1: June 11, 1998
Tape 1, Side A

Insert from Tape 3, Side B [6-24-98]
Tape 1, Side B
Tape 2, Side A
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Resume Tape 2, Side A
Tape 2, Side B not recorded

Interview 2: June 24, 1998
Tape 3, Side A
Tape 3, Side B
Tape 4, Side A
Tape 4, Side B not recorded

Interview 3: July 2, 1998
Tape 5, Side A
Tape 5, Side B
Tape 6, Side A
Tape 6, Side B not recorded

Interview 4: July 16, 1998
Tape 7, Side A
Tape 7, Side B
Tape 8, Side A
Tape 8, Side B
Insert from Tape 14, Side A [9-10-98]

Interview 5: August 13, 1998
Tape 9, Side A
Tape 9, Side B
Tape 10, Side A
Tape 10, Side B

Interview 6: August 27, 1998
Tape 11, Side A
Tape 11, Side B
Tape 12, Side A
Tape 12, Side B not recorded

Interview 7: September 10, 1998
Tape 13, Side A
Tape 13, Side B
Tape 14, Side A
Tape 14, Side B not recorded

1

11
13
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29
30

32
43
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57
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93

104
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119
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148

149
158
167

172
185
193

197 APPENDIX

Statement of Professor Henry F. May to a press conference on Friday, December 1», 196**

I am making this statement with the authorization of a group of department
chairmen established yesterday in an effort to establish a platform for solution
' ot the present crisis.

It is clear that many people do not understand vhy faculty members are sympa
thetic to any extent vith the rebellious students, and critical to some extent of
the administration. Of_ course , faculty members do not approve of demands for
capitulation, or of invasion of buildings — courses of action which are contrary
to all that ve believe in. But the remaining question is vhy such large numbers
of students, including many of our best students, many never involved in politics
in the past, are so deeply distressed and upset. Here the faculty, with regret,
has no choice but to be critical of the administration.

The whole affair started when privileges long customary — collection of
money, collection of signatures and the like were suddenly withdrawn by the admin
istration. These privileges had before this been used in what seems to me an in
offensive way. At the beginning of the present semester there were many tables at
the entrance to the Campus. For instance, there was a Goldwater table, one against
Proposition lU; there was a SNCC table, a CORE table, etc. I have heard no complaint
of violence or trouble resulting from collection of money or obtaining signatures.
In the opinion of students and of many of the faculty, the reasons given for the
withdrawal of these privileges were unconvincing and contradictory. It was said
that student political action was contrary to State law, a statement with which
the law professors I know do not agree. It was stated that the reason for the action
was to promote an easier flow of traffic and the like. In any case, it was this
action which led to the initial protest, culminating in the drastic incident of
October 2. (I might say that I refer here to the incident in which students pre
vented an arrest.) To prevent violence, a settlement was negotiated which involved,
among other things, the setting up of a tripartite student-faculty administration
committee which discussed these problems for a long time. These negotiations broke
down, and the faculty members of the group made public their recommendations for
new rules governing student political behavior. The efforts of the faculty members
in this respect were praised by the President. At the same time, another faculty
group, pursuant to the same agreement, made recommendations concerning punishment
of students arising out of this incident. At a Regents' meeting on November 20,
the recommendations of both these groups were accepted in part, though not entirely,
and at a subsequent meeting of the Academic Senate the majority of the faculty up
held the administration, and defeated an attempt to take enforcement of rules con
cerning political behavior from the administration and give it to the faculty. At
this point, with the announcement of the new rules, the Free Speech Movement was
dwindling and losing student support quite obviously. As a result, its leadership
was getting more and more radical as the more reasonable students withdrew. How
ever, during Thanksgiving week-end it seemed to most of us that peace was return
ing, and that it would be possible to go forward together under the new rules.

Then last Monday , the administration announced its decision to press for dis
ciplinary action against students for actions taken during the crisis two months
before. I am told that this decision was made against the urging of several highly
respected members of the faculty. While technically the action did not violate
previous agreements , it seemed to be contrary to the spirit of the agreement of
October 2, and subsequent negotiations. These seemed to imply that there have been
mistakes on all sides, and that punishments would be minimal.

198

Understandably, I think, the students felt tricked, and it is at this point
that the biggest demonstrations took place which had ever happened. The leader
ship of the FSM, reassured by this new support, made some rough threats to enter
Sproul Hall. No measures were taken to prevent this action. It happened, and the
Governor called in the police. Now the situation is a tragic one, and the University
seems almost in danger of disintegration. The faculty feels, as it said in an
emergency meeting yesterday, that the new rules should be enforced, that punitive
action against violations of University rules in the past should be called off,
and that while the administration should continue to deal with violations of rules,
a process of appeal to a faculty committee should be established. I might add that
such a faculty committee Bight veil be stricter in the enforcement of these rules
than the administration, particularly if any disruption of teaching were involved
No settlement is possible which does .not take account of the strong emotions now
influencing our students and many of our faculty.

199

December U, 196U

Final summary statement at the end of a press conference today.

All of the faculty speakers in this conference have said that they are deeply
critical of the FSM and its leadership. I want to make clear that this it not
said in order to appease hostile sentiment. All of us here would have said the
same thing at any time in the past tvo months. We are, however, equally critical
of the administration from which we expect more firmness, and in its statements,
to put it mildly, more consistency than has been shown.

I said earlier in answer to a question that I believe most of our students
are critical of the FSM and its leadership. To avoid misunderstanding, may I add
that most are also critical of the administration. As a purely private guess, I
would say that about 300 are with the FSM through thick and thin. About 1,200
obviously sided with the FSM after the announcement this past Monday concerning
retroactive punishments. Since the arrests, many more are involved in the present
unrest. There is also a minority of students, I believe a small one, articulately
hostile to the FSM, and pro-administration. Most, I believe, are bewildered,
distressed, and in a state of extreme emotion.

May I say a word about what I believe to be the underlying causes of these
sad and disturbing events. The first is the breakdown of communications on a
large campus which is undertaking the immensely difficult task of trying to be at
the same time a first-rate university and a mass institution. It is also part of
a new kind of state-wide university made up of a number of equal campuses. This
means that in many points it is not clear what level of the administration bears
responsibility for a given action.

The second underlying cause is the emergence of new categories of political
action on the borderline of legality. I believe that most of us on the faculty
would agree that sit-ins in a restaurant which has peculiar racial standards are
legal. We would agree that sit-ins undertaken in order to obtain the acceptance
of political demands are not. Between these two categories there is a borderline
which is very difficult for students as well as for other people to understand.

200

July 1999

INTERVIEWS ON THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Documenting the history of the University of California has been a
responsibility of the Regional Oral History Office since the Office was
established in 1954. Oral history memoirs with University-related persons
are listed below. They have been underwritten by the UC Berkeley
Foundation, the Chancellor's Office, University departments, or by
extramural funding for special projects. The oral histories, both tapes
and transcripts, are open to scholarly use in The Bancroft Library.
Bound, indexed copies of the transcripts are available at cost to
manuscript libraries.

UNIVERSITY FACULTY, ADMINISTRATORS, AND REGENTS

Adams, Frank. Irrigation, Reclamation, and Water Administration. 1956,
491 pp.

Amerine, Maynard A. The University of California and the State's Wine
Industry. 1971, 142 pp. (UC Davis professor.)

Amerine, Maynard A. Wine Bibliographies and Taste Perception Studies.
1988, 91 pp. (UC Davis professor.)

Bierman, Jessie. Maternal and Child Health in Montana, California, the
U.S. Children's Bureau and WHO, 1926-1967. 1987, 246 pp.

Bird, Grace. Leader in Junior College Education at Bakersfield and the
University of California. Two volumes, 1978, 342 pp.

Birge, Raymond Thayer. Raymond Thayer Birge, Physicist. 1960, 395 pp.

Blaisdell, Allen C. Foreign Students and the Berkeley International
House, 1928-1961. 1968, 419 pp.

Blaisdell, Thomas C., Jr. India and China in the World War I Era; New
Deal and Marshall Plan; and University of California, Berkeley.
1991, 373 pp.

Blum, Henrik. Equity for the Public's Health: Contra Costa Health

Officer; Professor, UC School of Public Health; WHO Fieldworker.
1999, 425 pp.

Bowker, Albert. Sixth Chancellor, University of California, Berkeley,
1971-1980; Statistician, and National Leader in the Policies and
Politics of Higher Education. 1995, 274 pp.

201

Brown, Delmer M. (In process.) Professor of Japanese history, 1946-
1977.

Chaney, Ralph Works. Paleobotanist, Conservationist. 1960, 277 pp.

Chao, Yuen Ren. Chinese Linguist, Phonologlst, Composer, and Author.
1977, 242 pp.

Constance, Lincoln. Versatile Berkeley Botanist: Plant Taxonomy and
University Governance. 1987, 362 pp.

Corley, James V. Serving the University in Sacramento. 1969, 143 pp.
Cross, Ira Brown. Portrait of an Economics Professor. 1967, 128 pp.

Cruess, William V. A Half Century in Food and Wine Technology. 1967,
122 pp.

Davidson, Mary Blossom. The Dean of Women and the Importance of
Students. 1967, 79 pp.

Davis, Banner. Founder of the Institute of Transportation and Traffic
Engineering. 1997, 173 pp.

DeMars, Vernon. A Life in Architecture: Indian Dancing, Migrant

Housing, Telesis, Design for Urban Living, Theater, Teaching.
1992, 592 pp.

Dennes, William R. Philosophy and the University Since 1915. 1970,
162 pp.

Donnelly, Ruth. The University's Role in Housing Services. 1970,
129 pp.

Ebright, Carroll "Ky". California Varsity and Olympics Crew Coach.
1968, 74 pp.

Eckbo, Garrett. Landscape Architecture: The Profession in California,
1935-1940, and Telesis. 1993, 103 pp.

Elberg, Sanford S. Graduate Education and Microbiology at the

University of California, Berkeley, 1930-1989. 1990, 269 pp.

Erdman, Henry E. Agricultural Economics: Teaching, Research, and

Writing, University of California, Berkeley, 1922-1969. 1971,
252 pp.

Esherick, Joseph. An Architectural Practice In the San Francisco Bay
Area, 1938-1996. 1996, 800 pp.

Evans, Clinton W. California Athlete, Coach, Administrator, Ambassador.
1968, 106 pp.

202

Foster, Herbert B. The Role of the Engineer's Office In the Development
of the University of California Campuses. 1960, 134 pp.

Gardner, David Pierpont. A Life in Higher Education: Fifteenth

President of the University of California, 1983-1992. 1997,
810 pp.

Grether, Ewald T. Dean of the UC Berkeley Schools of Business

Administration, 1943-1961; Leader in Campus Administration, Public
Service, and Marketing Studies; and Forever a Teacher. 1993,
1069 pp.

Hagar, Ella Barrows. Continuing Memoirs: Family, Community,

University. (Class of 1919, daughter of University President David
P. Barrows.) 1974, 272 pp.

Hamilton, Brutus. Student Athletics and the Voluntary Discipline.
1967, 50 pp.

Harding, Sidney T. A Life in Western Water Development. 1967, 524 pp.

Harris, Joseph P. Professor and Practitioner: Government, Election
Reform, and the Votomatic. 1983, 155 pp.

Hays, William Charles. Order, Taste, and Grace in Architecture. 1968,
241 pp.

Heller, Elinor Raas. A Volunteer in Politics, in Higher Education, and
on Governing Boards. Two volumes, 1984, 851 pp.

Helmholz, A. Carl. Physics and Faculty Governance at the University of
California Berkeley, 1937-1990. 1993, 387 pp.

Heyman, Ira Michael. (In process.) Professor of Law and Berkeley
Chancellor, 1980-1990.

Heyns, Roger W. Berkeley Chancellor, 1965-1971: The University in a
Turbulent Society. 1987, 180 pp.

Hildebrand, Joel H. Chemistry, Education, and the University of
California. 1962, 196 pp.

Huff, Elizabeth. Teacher and Founding Curator of the East Asiatic

Library: from Urbana to Berkeley by Way of Peking. 1977, 278 pp.

Huntington, Emily. A Career in Consumer Economics and Social Insurance.
1971, 111 pp.

Hutchison, Claude B. The College of Agriculture, University of
California, 1922-1952. 1962, 524 pp.

Jenny, Hans. Soil Scientist, Teacher, and Scholar. 1989, 364 pp.

203

Johnston, Marguerite Kulp, and Joseph R. Mixer. Student Housing,
Welfare, and the ASUC. 1970, 157 pp.

Jones, Mary C. Harold S. Jones and Mary C. Jones, Partners In
Longitudinal Studies. 1983, 154 pp.

Joslyn, Maynard A. A Technologist Views the California Wine Industry.
1974, 151 pp.

Kasimatis, Amandus N. A Career In California Viticulture. 1988, 54 pp.
(UC Davis professor.)

Kendrick, James B. Jr. From Plant Pathologist to Vice President for
Agricultural and Natural Resources, University of California,
1947-1986. 1989, 392 pp.

Kingman, Harry L. Citizenship in a Democracy. (Stiles Hall, University
YMCA.) 1973, 292 pp.

Roll, Michael J. The Lair of the Bear and the Alumni Association, 1949-
1993. 1993, 387 pp.

Kragen, Adrian A. A Law Professor's Career: Teaching, Private Practice,
and Legislative Representation, 1934 to 1989. 1991, 333 pp.

Kroeber-Quinn, Theodora. Timeless Woman, Writer and Interpreter of the
California Indian World. 1982, 453 pp.

Landreth, Catherine. The Nursery School of the Institute of Child

Welfare of the University of California, Berkeley. 1983, 51 pp.

Langelier, Wilfred E. Teaching, Research, and Consultation in Water
Purification and Sewage Treatment, University of California at
Berkeley, 1916-1955. 1982, 81 pp.

Lehman, Benjamin H. Recollections and Reminiscences of Life in the Bay
Area from 1920 Onward. 1969, 367 pp.

Lenzen, Victor F. Physics and Philosophy. 1965, 206 pp.

Leopold, Luna. Hydrology, Geomorphology, and Environmental Policy: U.S.
Geological Survey, 1950-1972, and the UC Berkeley, 1972-1987.
1993, 309 pp.

Lessing, Ferdinand D. Early Years. (Professor of Oriental Languages.)
1963, 70 pp.

McGauhey, Percy H. The Sanitary Engineering Research Laboratory:
Administration, Research, and Consultation, 1950-1972. 1974,
259 pp.

McCaskill, June. Herbarium Scientist, University of California, Davis.
1989, 83 pp. (UC Davis professor.)

204

McLaughlin, Donald. Careers in Mining Geology and Management,
University Governance and Teaching. 1975, 318 pp.

May, Henry F. Professor of American Intellectual History, University of
California, Berkeley, 1952-1980. 1999, 218 pp.

Merritt, Ralph P. After Me Cometh a Builder, the Recollections of Ralph
Palmer Merritt. 1962, 137 pp. (UC Rice and Raisin Marketing.)

Metcalf, Woodbridge. Extension Forester, 1926-1956. 1969, 138 pp.
Meyer, Karl F. Medical Research and Public Health. 1976, 439 pp.
Miles, Josephine. Poetry, Teaching, and Scholarship. 1980, 344 pp.
Mitchell, Lucy Sprague. Pioneering in Education. 1962, 174 pp.

Morgan, Elmo. Physical Planning and Management: Los Alamos, University

of Utah, University of California, and AID, 1942-1976. 1992, 274 pp,

Neuhaus, Eugen. Reminiscences: Bay Area Art and the University of
California Art Department. 1961, 48 pp.

Newell, Pete. UC Berkeley Athletics and a Life in Basketball: Coaching
Collegiate and Olympic Champions; Managing, Teaching, and
Consulting in the NBA, 1935-1995. 1997, 470 pp.

Newman, Frank. Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley,

1946-present, Justice, California Supreme Court, 1977-1983. 1994,
336 pp. (Available through California State Archives.)

Neylan, John Francis. Politics, Law, and the University of California.
1962, 319 pp.

Nyswander, Dorothy B. Professor and Activist for Public Health
Education in the Americas and Asia. 1994, 318 pp.

O'Brien, Morrough P. Dean of the College of Engineering, Pioneer in
Coastal Engineering, and Consultant to General Electric. 1989,
313 pp.

Olmo, Harold P. Plant Genetics and New Grape Varieties. 1976, 183 pp.
(UC Davis professor.)

Ough, Cornelius. Recollections of an Enologist, University of
California, Davis, 1950-1990. 1990, 66 pp.

Pepper, Stephen C. Art and Philosophy at the University of California,
1919-1962. 1963, 471 pp.

Pitzer, Kenneth. Chemist and Administrator at UC Berkeley, Rice

University, Stanford University, and the Atomic Energy Commission,
1935-1997. 1999, 558 pp.

205

Porter, Robert Langley. Physician, Teacher and Guardian of the Public
Health. 1960, 102 pp. (UC San Francisco professor.)

Reeves, William. Arbovirologist and Professor, UC Berkeley School of
Public Health. 1993, 686 pp.

Revelle, Roger. Oceanography, Population Resources and the World.
1988. (UC San Diego professor.) (Available through Archives,
Scripps Institute of Oceanography, University of California, San
Diego, La Jolla, California 92093.)

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. Professor of Russian and European Intellectual
History, University of California, Berkeley, 1957-1997. 1998,
310 pp.

Richardson, Leon J. Berkeley Culture, University of California

Highlights, and University Extension, 1892-1960. 1962, 248 pp.

Robb, Agnes Roddy. Robert Gordon Sproul and the University of
California. 1976, 134 pp.

Rossbach, Charles Edwin. Artist, Mentor, Professor, Writer. 1987,
157 pp.

Schnier, Jacques. A Sculptor's Odyssey. 1987, 304 pp.

Schorske, Carl E. (In process.) Professor, Department of History.

Scott, Geraldine Knight. A Woman in Landscape Architecture in
California, 1926-1989. 1990, 235 pp.

Shields, Peter J. Reminiscences of the Father of the Davis Campus.
1954, 107 pp.

Sproul, Ida Wittschen. The President's Wife. 1981, 347 pp.

Stampp, Kenneth M. Historian of Slavery, the Civil War, and

Reconstruction, University of California, Berkeley, 1946-1983.
1998, 310 pp.

Stern, Milton. The Learning Society: Continuing Education at NYU,
Michigan, and UC Berkeley, 1946-1991. 1993, 292 pp.

Stevens, Frank C. Forty Years in the Office of the President,
University of California, 1905-1945. 1959, 175 pp.

Stewart, George R. A Little of Myself. (Author and UC Professor of
English.) 1972, 319 pp.

Stripp, Fred S. Jr. University Debate Coach, Berkeley Civic Leader,
and Pastor. 1990, 75 pp.

206

Strong, Edward W. Philosopher, Professor, and Berkeley Chancellor,
1961-1965. 1992, 530 pp.

Struve, Gleb. (In process.) Professor of Slavic Languages and
Literature.

Taylor, Paul Schuster.

Volume I: Education, Field Research, and Family, 1973, 342 pp.
Volume II and Volume III: California Water and Agricultural Labor,
1975, 519 pp.

Thygeson, Phillips. External Eye Disease and the Proctor Foundation.
1988, 321 pp. (UC San Francisco professor.) (Available through
the Foundation of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.)

Tien, Chang-Lin. (In process.) Berkeley Chancellor, 1990-1997.
Towle, Katherine A. Administration and Leadership. 1970, 369 pp.

Townes, Charles H. A Life in Physics: Bell Telephone Laboratories and
WWII, Columbia University and the Laser, MIT and Government
Service; California and Research in Astrophysics. 1994, 691 pp.

Underbill, Robert M. University of California: Lands, Finances, and
Investments. 1968, 446 pp.

Vaux, Henry J. Forestry in the Public Interest: Education, Economics,
State Policy, 1933-1983. 1987, 337 pp.

Wada, Yori. Working for Youth and Social Justice: The YMCA, the

University of California, and the Stulsaft Foundation. 1991,
203 pp.

Waring, Henry C. Henry C. Waring on University Extension. 1960,
130 pp.

Wellman, Harry. Teaching, Research and Administration, University of
California, 1925-1968. 1976, 259 pp.

Vessels, Glenn A. Education of an Artist. 1967, 326 pp.

Westphal, Katherine. Artist and Professor. 1988, 190 pp. (UC Davis
professor. )

Whinnery, John. Researcher and Educator in Electromagnetics,

Microwaves, and Optoelectronics, 1935-1995; Dean of the College of
Engineering, UC Berkeley, 1950-1963. 1996, 273 pp.

Wiegel, Robert L. Coastal Engineering: Research, Consulting, and
Teaching, 1946-1997. 1997, 327 pp.

Williams, Arleigh. Dean of Students Arleigh Williams: The Free Speech
Movement and the Six Years' War, 1964-1970. 1990, 329 pp.

207

Williams, Arleigh and Betty H. Neely. Disabled Students' Residence
Program. 1987, 41 pp.

Wilson, Garff B. The Invisible Man, or, Public Ceremonies Chairman at
Berkeley for Thirty-Five Years. 1981, 442 pp.

Winkler, Albert J. Viticultural Research at UC Davis, 1921-1971. 1973,
144 pp.

Woods, Baldwin M. t/niversity of California Extension. 1957, 102 pp.

Wurster, William Wilson. College of Environmental Design, University of
California, Campus Planning, and Architectural Practice. 1964,
339 pp.

MULTI- INTERVIEWEE PROJECTS

Blake Estate Oral History Project. 1988, 582 pp.

Architects landscape architects, gardeners, presidents of UC
document the history of the UC presidential residence. Includes
interviews with Mai Arbegast, Igor Blake, Ron and Myra Brocchini,
Toichi Domoto, Eliot Evans, Tony Hail, Linda Haymaker, Charles
Hitch, Flo Holmes, Clark and Kay Kerr, Gerry Scott, George and
Helena Thacher, Walter Vodden, and Norma Wilier.

Centennial History Project, 1954-1960. 329 pp.

Includes interviews with George P. Adams, Anson Stiles Blake,
Walter C. Blasdale, Joel H. Hildebrand, Samuel J. Holmes, Alfred L.
Kroeber, Ivan M. Linforth, George D. Louderback, Agnes Fay Morgan,
and William Popper. (Bancroft Library use only.)

Thomas D. Church, Landscape Architect. Two volumes, 1978, 803 pp.

Volume I: Includes interviews with Theodore Bernardi, Lucy Butler,
June Meehan Campbell, Louis De Monte, Walter Doty, Donn Emmons,
Floyd Gerow, Harriet Henderson, Joseph Howland, Ruth Jaffe, Burton
Litton, Germane Milano, Miriam Pierce, George Rockrise, Robert
Royston, Geraldine Knight Scott, Roger Sturtevant, Francis Violich,
and Harold Watkin.

Volume II: Includes interviews with Maggie Baylis, Elizabeth
Roberts Church, Robert Glasner, Grace Hall, Lawrence Halprin,
Proctor Mellquist, Everitt Miller, Harry Sanders, Lou Schenone,
Jack Stafford, Goodwin Steinberg, and Jack Wagstaff .

Interviews with Dentists. (Dental History Project, University of

California, San Francisco.) 1969, 1114 pp. Includes interviews
with Dickson Bell, Reuben L. Blake, Willard C. Fleming, George A.
Hughes, Leland D. Jones, George F. McGee, C. E. Rutledge, William
B. Ryder, Jr., Herbert J. Samuels, Joseph Sciutto, William S.
Smith, Harvey Stallard, George E. Steninger, and Abraham W. Ward.
(Bancroft Library use only.)

208

Julia Morgan Architectural History Project. Two volumes, 1976, 621 pp.
Volume I: The Work of Walter Steilberg and Julia Morgan, and the
Department of Architecture, UCB, 1904-1954.

Includes interviews with Walter T. Steilberg, Robert Ratcliff,
Evelyn Paine Ratcliff, Norman L. Jensen, John E. Wagstaff , George
C. Hodges, Edward B. Hussey, and Warren Charles Perry.

Volume II: Julia Morgan, Her Office, and a House.

Includes interviews with Mary Grace Barren, Kirk 0. Rowlands, Norma

Wilier, Quintilla Williams, Catherine Freeman Nimitz, Polly

Lawrence McNaught, Hettie Belle Marcus, BJarne Dahl, Bjarne Dahl,

Jr., Morgan North, Dorothy Wormser Coblentz, and Flora d'llle

North.

The Prytaneans: An Oral History of the Prytanean Society and its
Members. (Order from Prytanean Society.)
Volume I: 1901-1920, 1970, 307 pp.
Volume II: 1921-1930, 1977, 313 pp.
Volume III: 1931-1935, 1990, 343 pp.

Six Weeks in Spring, 1985: Managing Student Protest at UC Berkeley.

887 pp. Transcripts of sixteen interviews conducted during July-
August 1985 documenting events on the UC Berkeley campus in April-
May 1985 and administration response to student activities
protesting university policy on investments in South Africa.
Interviews with: Ira Michael Heyman, chancellor; Watson Laetsch,
vice chancellor; Roderic Park, vice chancellor; Ronald Wright, vice
chancellor; Richard Hafner, public affairs officer; John Cummins
and Michael R. Smith, chancellor's staff; Patrick Hayashi and B.
Thomas Travers, undergraduate affairs; Mary Jacobs, Hal Reynolds,
and Michelle Woods, student affairs; Derry Bowles, William Foley,
Joseph Johnson, and Ellen Stetson, campus police. (Bancroft
Library use only.)

Robert Gordon Sproul Oral History Project. Two volumes, 1986, 904 pp.
Includes interviews with thirty- five persons who knew him well:
Horace M. Albright, Stuart LeRoy Anderson, Katherine Connick
Bradley, Franklin M. "Dyke" Brown, Ernest H. Burness, Natalie
Cohen, Paul A. Dodd, May Dornin, Richard E. Erickson, Walter S.
Frederick, David P. Gardner, Marion Sproul Goodin, Vernon L.
Goodin, Louis H. Heilbron, Robert S. Johnson, Clark Kerr, Adrian A.
Kragen, Mary Blumer Lawrence, Stanley E. McCaffrey, Dean McHenry,
Donald H. McLaughlin, Kendric Morrish, Marion Morrish, William Penn
Mott, Jr., Herman Phleger, John B. deC. M. Saunders, Carl W.
Sharsmith, John A. Sproul, Robert Gordon Sproul, Jr., Wallace
Sterling, Wakefield Taylor, Robert M. Underbill , Eleanor L. Van
Horn, Garff B. Wilson, and Pete L. Yzaguirre.

209

The University of California during the Presidency of David P. Gardner,
1983-1992. (In process.)

Interviews with members of the university community and state
government officials.

The Women's Faculty Club of the University of California at Berkeley,
1919-1982. 1983, 312 pp.

Includes interviews with Josephine Smith, Margaret Murdock, Agnes
Robb, May Dornin, Josephine Miles, Gudveig Gordon-Britland,
Elizabeth Scott, Marian Diamond, Mary Ann Johnson, Eleanor Van
Horn, and Ratherine Van Valer Williams.

UC BERKELEY BLACK ALUMNI ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Broussard, Allen. A California Supreme Court Justice Looks at Law and
Society, 1969-1996. 1997, 266 pp.

Ferguson, Lloyd Noel. Increasing Opportunities In Chemistry, 1936-1986.
1992, 74 pp.

Gordon, Walter A. Athlete, Officer in Law Enforcement and

Administration, Governor of the Virgin Islands. Two volumes, 1980,
621 pp.

Jackson, Ida. Overcoming Barriers in Education. 1990, 80 pp.

Patterson, Charles. Working for Civic Unity in Government, Business,
and Philanthropy. 1994, 220 pp.

Pittman, Tarea Hall. NAACP Official and Civil Rights Worker. 1974,
159 pp.

Poston, Marvin. Making Opportunities in Vision Care. 1989, 90 pp.

Rice, Emmett J. Education of an Economist: From Fulbrlght Scholar to
the Federal Reserve Board, 1951-1979. 1991, 92 pp.

Rumford, William Byron. Legislator for Fair Employment, Fair Housing,
and Public Health. 1973, 152 pp.

Williams, Archie. The Joy of Flying: Olympic Gold, Air Force Colonel,
and Teacher. 1993, 85 pp.

Wilson, Lionel. Attorney, Judge, Oakland Mayor. 1992, 104 pp.

210

UC BERKELEY CLASS OF 1931 ENDOWMENT SERIES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,
SOURCE OF COMMUNITY LEADERS (OUTSTANDING ALUMNI)

Bennett, Mary Woods (class of 1931). A Career in Higher Education:
Mills College 1935-1974. 1987, 278 pp.

Bridges, Robert L. (class of 1930). Sixty Years of Legal Advice to
International Construction Firms; Thelen, Marrin, Johnson and
Bridges, 1933-1997, 1998, 134 pp.

Browne, Alan K. (class of 1931). "Mr. Municipal Bond": Bond Investment
Management, Bank of America, 1929-1971. 1990, 325 pp.

Coliver, Edith (class of 1943). (In process.) Foreign aid specialist.

Dettner, Anne Degruchy Low-Beer (class of 1926). A Woman's Place in
Science and Public Affairs, 1932-1973. 1996, 260 pp.

Devlin, Marion (class of 1931). Women's News Editor: Vallejo Times-
Herald, 1931-1978. 1991, 157 pp.

Hassard, H. Howard (class of 1931). The California Medical Association,
Medical Insurance, and the Law, 1935-1992. 1993, 228 pp.

Hedgpeth, Joel (class of 1931). Marine Biologist and Environmentalist:
Pycnogonids, Progress, and Preserving Bays, Salmon, and Other
Living Things. 1996, 319 pp.

Heilbron, Louis (class of 1928). Most of a Century: Law and Public
Service, 1930s to 1990s. 1995, 397 pp.

Kay, Harold (class of 1931). A Berkeley Boy's Service to the Medical
Community of Alameda County, 1935-1994. 1994, 104 pp.

Kragen, Adrian A. (class of 1931). A Law Professor' s Career: Teaching,
Private Practice, and Legislative Representative, 1934 to 1989.
1991, 333 pp.

Peterson, Rudolph (class of 1925). A Career in International Banking
with the Bank of America, 1936-1970, and the United Nations
Development Program, 1971-1975. 1994, 408 pp.

Stripp, Fred S. Jr. (class of 1932). University Debate Coach, Berkeley
Civic Leader, and Pastor. 1990, 75 pp.

Trefethen, Eugene (class of 1930). Kaiser Industries, Trefethen

Vineyards, the University of California, and Mills College, 1926-
1997. 1997, 189 pp.

211

UC BERKELEY ALUMNI DISCUSS THE UNIVERSITY

Griffiths, Farnham P. (class of 1906). The University of California and
the California Bar. 1954, 46 pp.

Ogg, Robert Danforth (class of 1941). Business and Pleasure:

Electronics, Anchors, and the University of California. 1989,
157 pp.

Olney, Mary McLean (class of 1895). Oakland, Berkeley, and the
University of California, 1880-1895. 1963, 173 pp.

Selvin, Herman F. (class of 1924). The University of California and
California Law and Lawyers, 1920-1978. 1979, 217 pp.

Shurtleff, Roy L. (class of 1912). The University's Class of 1912,

Investment Banking, and the Shurtleff Family History. 1982, 69 pp.

Stewart, Jessie Harris (class of 1914). Memories of Girlhood and the
University. 1978, 70 pp.

Witter, Jean C. (class of 1916). The University, the Community, and the
Lifeblood of Business. 1968, 109 pp.

DONATED ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

Almy, Millie. .Reflections of Early Childhood Education: 1934-1994.
1997, 89 pp.

Cal Band Oral History Project. An ongoing series of interviews with Cal
Band members and supporters of Cal spirit groups. (University
Archives, Bancroft Library use only.)

Crooks, Afton E. On Balance, One Woman's Life and View of University of
California Management, 1954-1990: An Oral History Memoir of the
Life of Afton E. Crooks. 1994, 211 pp.

Weaver, Harold F. Harold F. Weaver, California Astronomer. 1993,
165 pp.

INDEX- -Henry May

212

academic freedom, 116, 137
Advanced Naval Intelligence School

(ANIS), 55-56

affirmative action, 135, 174-176
African-American studies, UC

Berkeley, 150, 156
alcohol, consumption of, 5, 50
American Association of University

Professors (AAUP), 79
American Catholic Historical

Society, 111

American civilizations, 36, 42
American Historical Association,

97

American Historical Review. Ill
American history, 31, 33, 42, 93-

94; early American history,

110-112, 176, 178. See also

history; intellectual history;

religious history.
American Society for Church

History, 111-112
American Student Union, 26, 46
American Studies, 174; in Europe,

73-76, 106, 108-109; in Great

Britian, 172; in the Soviet

Union, 181

American Veteran's Committee, 65
anti-Catholicism, 87, 88
anti-communism, 115-116
anti-Semitism, 87, 94, 96. See

also Jews, attitudes towards
Anti-Vietnam War movement, 134-

139, 142-143, 155. See also

Faculty Peace Committee; San

Francisco peace march.

Bancroft Library, The, 8. See
also Henry F. May Collection of
Protest Handbills

Baylin, Bernard, 181

Beatty, Sir Arthur Chester, 184

Belgium, youthful travels in, 11;

adult experiences in, 106-109
Benjamin, Eddie, 38
Berkeley Citation, 191
Berkeley High School, 16, 86
Berkeley Student Revolt; Facts and

Interpretations. The (1965),

120
Berkeley, California, childhood

in, 8-11, 13-17; during the

1950s, 82-119; hiking in, 30;

John Muir Grammar School, 10;

National Guard in, 153;

neighborhoods of, 8, 83; school

system in, 85-86. See also

University High School,

People's Park.
Berkeley, UC. See University of

California, Berkeley.
Beveridge Prize in American

History, 178
Black Power movement, 134-135,

149
black studies, UC Berkeley. See

African-American studies, UC

Berkeley.

Bolton, Herbert Eugene, 93
book reviews, professional

importance of, 103
Borah, Woodrow, 94
Boston, impression of, 34, 41, 66
Boulder, CO, 53-55
Boulding, Kenneth, 74
Bouwsma, Beverly, 85, 148
Bouwsma, William, 85, 87, 90, 91,

92, 108, 133, 148, 166, 179,

191

Bowdoin College, ME, 35, 76-77
Brentano, Carroll, 117
Brentano, Robert, 84 117, 152,

175
Bridenbaugh, Carl, 40, 86, 89,

98, 101, 165, 166, 169
Bridges, Harry, 26-27

213

Browder, Earl, 26
Brown, Delmer, 129

Calvinism. See religion

Cambridge University, Pitt
Professor at, 172-174

Cambridge, MA, 31

Capper, Charlie, 140

Catholic Univeristy of Lublin,
Poland, 182

Catholicism. See anti-
Catholicism; religion.

Claremont Colleges, 68. See
also Scripps College.

Claremont Hotel (Berkeley), 15

Claremont, CA, 67-71, 83, 86

Columbia University, 151-152

Coming to Terms (1987), 1-3, 29,
186, 187

Committee of Two Hundred, 126,
129, 163

Communism, UC Berkeley lecture
series on, 115-116

Communist Party, 25-27, 32, 44-
48, 77-79. See also anti-
communism.

Concord, Massachusetts, 110-111

Constance, Lincoln, 91

Cornell University, 170

Crews, Fred, 142

Curtis, Perry, 165

Daily Cal. 24, 149
Depression, "The Great", 8
depression, struggle with, 191
diphtheria, childhood bout with,

12
Divided Heart; Essays on

Protestantism and the

Enlightenment in America. The

(1991), 188, 192
Dupree, A. Hunter, 98, 166
Dylan, Bob, 119

Emaneau, Murray, 121
Emmons, Nathanael, 2

End of American Innocence (1959),

100-105, 193, 194
"Enlightened Reader in America,

The" (June 1976), 178
Enlightenment in America, The

(1976), 17, 104-105, 109-112,

176-179
ethnic relations and prejudices,

5, 10, 14, 21, 43-44, 53-53.

See also anti-Catholicism;

anti-Semitism; Black Power

movement; Jews, attitudes

towards .

ethnic studies, 150, 156, 166
Europe, youthful travels to, 11-

13
Examiner (San Francisco), 23

Faculty Forum, 129-132, 138, 163
Faculty Peace Committee, 142-143
feminist movement, 138. See also

women, attitudes towards
Feuer, Lewis S., 128, 165
filthy speech movement, 143-144
fraternities, UC Berkeley, 17
Free Speech Movement, 28, 93,
114; Academic Senate response
to, 123-124, 128;
administration response to,
125, 132-133; Bancroft Strip,
120, 124; faculty attitudes
toward, 125; graduate students
and, 139-140; Greek Theatre,
meeting at, 126-129; personal
impact on Henry F. May, 127-
128, 131; precipitating events,
120-122; Regents response to,
124; relation to civil rights
movement, 134; State response
to, 125; student support for,
124; Tripartitite Committee,
124; "May Resolution", 122-126.
See also Committee of Two
Hundred; Faculty Forum.
Free Speech Movement; Coming of
Age in the Sixties. The (1993),
128

214

Free University of Brussels

(Belgium), 106
freedom of speech, 23-24, 28,

114, 115, 120, 128, 143, 144.

See also academic freedom;

filthy speech movement , Free

Speech Movement .

French language, 12, 107-108, 109
Fulbright Fellowship, 105-109

passim

Gavin, James M. , 136

Gaw, William, 190

gay rights, 138, 174

Glazer, Nathan, 165

Goines, David Lance, 128, 139,

graduate students, placement of,
184; exams administered to, 99,
intellectual relationship with,
104, 168; social life of, 117-
118

Guttridge, George, 90, 93, 130,
149

Haber, Sam, 184

Hard, Frederick, 67, 70

Harper, Larry, 66, 153

Harvard University, 30-31, 33-49

passim. 110-111; Dunster House,

36-38, 47; Episcopal

Theological School, 36; Perkins

House, 34; radical politics at,

37, 44-49; Widener Library, 110
Henry F. May Collection of Protest

Handbills, 28
Herr, Richard, 112
Heyns, Roger, 132-133, 145, 147,

150

Hicks, Granville, 47
Hicks, John, 66, 74, 80, 82, 90,

91, 94, 98, 117
hiking, experiences, 29-30
Hindmarsh, Albert E., 53
Hiroshima, bombing of, 61-63
History, Department of, UC

Berkeley, 110; anti-Vietnam

War movement, 155-156

History, Department of (cont'd.)
appointments and promotion, 80-
81, 82, 89-94, 101, 112;
curriculum, 99; faculty,
political and social attitudes
of, 86-88; 129-132; faculty,
death of, 149; faculty
departures from, 165-167;
governance of, 112, 131;
Margaret Byrne Chair, 169; old
guard, 87, 93; political
differences within, 141;
reactions to student movement,
126-127; recruitment by, 73,
79; socializing within, 83-85,
91-92, 147-148; women and
minorities in, 88, 175. See
also graduate students;
teaching history.

history, professional

organizations and identity,
96-98; reflection on the craft
of, 192-195; research methods,
71-72, 100, 110. See also
teaching, American history,
intellectual history, religious
history.

Ideas, Faiths and Feelings (1983),

188

India, travels to, 185
intellectual history, 71-73, 82,

96, 98, 110, 161, 181, 192;

teaching of, 176, 177
Ivanoff, Sol, 21

Japan, American occupation of,

61-63; postwar prostitution in,
62; travels to, 185-186

Japanese language. See World War
II, Japanese language school.

Jews, attitudes towards, 10, 21,
43, 96

Kennedy, John F., 113-114
Kennedy, Robert, 134

215

Kennerley, Mitchell, 103
Kerr, Clark, 91, 98, 116, 122,

127, 132, 141
Knopf, Alfred, 102-103
Knopf, Blanche, 102
Koch, Adrienne, 88
Korean War, attitudes towards,

136

KPFA (Pacifica) broadcasts, 121
Kuhn, Thomas S., 90, 165, 166

labor history, 71-73

Lair of the Bear, retirement party

at, 184-185
Lawrence College, Wisconsin, 48,

49-51, 70

Lehman, Benjamin, 19
Lend-Lease Act, attitude towards,

45-48

Leopold, Richard, 67
Levenson, Joseph, 84, 87, 112,

149

Levering Act, CA, 80
Levine, Lawrence, 140, 156
Lipset, Seymour Martin, 165
Litwack, Leon, 140, 156
Longshoreman's Union, 26-27
loyalty oath, University of

California, 79
Lyon, Bruce, 165

Majdanek, Poland, 182

Malia, Martin, 116, 129, 142

Mann, Golo, 69

Mar in County, CA, 29

Marx, Leo, 56, 66, 77, 79

Matthiessen, F. 0., 46, 105

May family papers, 2

May family, Boston, 34

May, Ann (daughter), 69, 77, 106-

107, 119, 174
May, Elizabeth (sister), 7, 20,

80, 85, 184
May, Henry F. (father), 2-6, 9,

20, 24-25, 187
May, Henry F., 1-195 passim

May, Hildegarde [Hildy]

(daughter), 69, 73, 76, 80,

106-107, 119, 174
May, Jean Terrace (wife), 29, 38-

40, 48, 51, 52, 64, 73, 76, 80,

82-83, 85, 104, 127, 142, 148,

171, 185
May, John [Richard] (brother), 7,

20, 56, 64, 80, 85, 184
May, May Rickard (mother), 3, 5,

7, 8, 24, 52, 64
McCarthy, Eugene, 134, 143
McClosky, Herbert, 123
McCormac, Eugene, 9, 93
McNamara, Robert, 113
Merk, Frederick, 40, 49
Merle Curti Prize in American

Intellectual History, 178
Merritt College, 13
Meyerson, Martin, 132
Middlekauff, Robert, 178
Miller, Perry, 40, 41, 46, 67,

105

Morison, Samuel Eliot, 40, 41
Moscow State University, 181
Mungie. See Thompson, Mary

Grossman

Murchio, Jack, 28, 85
Muscatine Report on Educational

Reform, 144, 145, 156

New England, impression of, 110-
111

Occident, The. 18
Okinawa campaign, 57-61
On Civil Disobedience. 109
Organization of American

Historians, Distinguished

Citizen Award, 191
Overstreet, Burr, 17-18, 22, 114

pacifism, 22. See also Anti-
Vietnam War movement ; Faculty
Peace Committee; peace strike;
San Franci ;co peace march.

216

Packard, Emmy Lou, 18

Padden, Robert, 165

painting, avocation of, 190-191

Paris, France, 11-12, 73

Patigny, Berthe, 107, 109

Paxson, Frederick L., 9, 66, 94,

98
peace strike (1930s), at UC

Berkeley, 22-23
Peltason, Jack, 87
People's Park (Berkeley, CA) ,

134, 151-154

Perkins, Dexter, 74, 76
Poland, impressions of, 182
police activity, during student

unrest, 121, 152
politics, left-wing, 21, 22-23,

24, 25-29, 44-49; in post-war

Europe, 75; shift in, 75, 77-

79, 129; conservative groups,

77. See also student

radicalism.
Progressive Party. See Wallace,

Henry.
Protestant Churches and Industrial

America (1949), 71-73
Pulitzer Prize, 103
Puritans, 41-42

Rackliffe, Jack, 37, 38, 44, 47,
66

Radke, Mrs. [Department of History
Secretary, UCB], 81

Rand McNally publishers, 141

Rappaport, Armin, 165

Reagan, Ronald, 153

Recovery of American Religious
History. The. Ill

religion, 2, 5, 6, 87, 106, 111;
personal importance of, 78, 87-
88,108, 112. See_also Anti-
Catholicism; Anti-Semitism;
Jews, attitudes towards.

religious education, 76

religious history, 40, 41-42, 71-
73, 111-112, 178, 183;
dissertation on, 40, 42-43, 55-
57, 65

Roligious Studies, Department of,

UC Berkeley, 179-180
retirement, 184-186
Reynolds, John H., 123
Rhodes Scholarship, 31
Rickard, Lilian (grandmother), 11
Rickard, Nina Belle (aunt), 11,

12

Rivera, Diego, 18
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 8-9
Rosovsky, Henry, 165

Salzberg Seminar in American

Studies (1949), 73-76. See

also American Studies.
San Francisco peace march

(November 1969), 138
Sather Gate (Sather Strip), 28,

114, 150, 153
Savio, Mario, 121, 127
Scalapino, Robert, 123, 127
Schlesinger, Arthur M. , 40, 42,

65, 66-67, 80, 97, 105
Schorer, Mark, 144
Schorske, Carl, 88, 112, 116,

126, 133, 163-164
Schumpter, Joseph, 37
Schumann, Franz, 116, 142
Scripps College, Claremont, CA,

67-71
SDS. See Students for a

Democratic Society.
Searle, John, 133, 148
Sellers, Charles, 98, 140-141
Smith, Henry Nash, 37, 42, 74,

79, 85, 90, 103, 130, 148, 154,

188

Sontag, Raymond, 90-91, 98
Soviet Union, 26, 45
Soviet-American Historians

Colloquium (1972), 180-182
sports, 13, 21-22
Sproul, Robert Gordon, 23-24
Stampp, Kenneth, 84-85, 90, 92,

98, 130, 140, 148, 156, 169,

189, 191

Stanford University, 20, 21
Starobin, Robert, 139

217

Steffens, Lincoln, 18

Stein, Gertrude, 18

Strachey, John, 27

Strauss, Lawrence, 10

Strong, Edward, 113-115, 124, 132

student radicalism, 133-139, 157-

164, 194. See also Free Speech

Movement .
Students for a Democratic Society,

133

students. See graduate students
Sweezy, Paul, 37
Synopsis of American History, A

(1963), 140-141

teaching, 49, 89, 95-96, 170-171,
183. See also graduate
students.

Third World Strike (1969), 149-
151, 152. See also African-
American studies; ethnic
relations; ethnic studies

Thompson, Mary Grossman (Mungie),
7, 9, 52

Three Faces of Berkeley (1993),
188-189

Throckmorton Manor, 117-118

travel, cross-continental rail,
31, 33

Troeltsch, Ernst, 42

Trotskyites, 26-27, 45

Troyer, Howard, 50

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 40

University High School (Berkeley,
CA), 6, 13-17, 20

University Club, San Francisco, 4

University of California,
Berkeley, 79-185 passim;
Academic Senate, 123-124, 137,
147, 150; Board of Educational
Development, 146; changes in
social behavior at, 167;
College of Letters and Science,
150; curricular development at,
145-146; during student unrest
of 1960s, 119-172 passim;

University of California, Berkeley
(cont'd.), during the 1950s,
82-119 passim; Faculty Club,
66, 86; faculty, divisions
among, 130, 131; faculty
response to student unrest,
123-124; faculty standard of
living, 83-84; library
collections, 100; political and
social liberalism at, 87;
public attitude towards, 8, 23,
151-154; radical politics in
the 1930s, 21, 22-23, 24, 25-
29; Section Club, 85; social
relations at during the 1930s,
17-30; state governmental
response to, 153; student
housing at, 117-118;
undergraduate experience at
(1933-1937), 17-30 passim;
Vietnam Commencement at, 136;
Vietnam University, 154, 155-
156. See also Academic Senate;
Bancroft Library, The;
Religious Studies, Department
of, UC Berkeley; Free Speech
Movement; History, Department
of, UC Berkeley; loyalty oath;
Muscat ine Report on Educational
Reform (1966).

University of California, quarter
system, controversy over, 122,
141

University of Ghent (Belgium), 106

University of Liege (Belgium) ,
106, 109

University of Minnesota, 79, 169

University of Louvain (Belgium) ,
106, 109

University of Wisconsin, 169

Van Nostrand, John, 68
Veterans of Foreign Wars, 65
Vietnam War, selective service and
the universities during the,
137-138, 159. See also Anti-
Vietnam War Movement.

218

Wagner, Henry, 8

Wallace, Henry, 77-78

Waybur, Bruce, 31

Webster, Richard, 116

Whipple, T. K., 19

Wolin, Sheldon S., 156

women, attitude toward, 16, 19,
70-71; in higher education, 88,
173, 175; women's liberation,
174

World War I, 24, historiography
of, 102

World War II, 52-63 passim;

Amphibious Group 12 (Phib Group
12), 57-61, 194; commendation
ribbon for, 64; Japanese
language school, 53-55;
Japanese-Americans, attitudes
towards, 53-55; kamakaze
pilots, interrogation of, 59-
60; Pearl Harbor, Hawaii,
wartime experiences in, 56-57.
See also Hiroshima, bombing of;
Okinawa campaign.

Wriston, Henry, 49

youth culture, 119
Zelnik, Reginald, 129, 134

ANN LAGE

B.A., and M.A., in History, University of
California, Berkeley.

Postgraduate studies, University of
California, Berkeley, American history and
education.

Chairman, Sierra Club History Committee, 1978-1986;
oral history coordinator, 1974-present; Chairman,
Sierra Club Library Committee, 1993-present.

Interviewer /Editor, Regional Oral History
Office, in the fields of natural resources
and the environment, university history,
California political history, 1976-present.

Principal Editor, assistant office head, Regional
Oral History Office, 1994-present.

99 OOR

C

"Ill