by Lukas Klessig
Lukas Klessig reached out to me upon the publication of his hybrid memoir, Words with My Father. The memoir combines writings by his father, Lowell Klessig, with Lukas’ own observations of growing up with a parent diagnosed bipolar. Lukas’ touching posthumous gift to father Lowell is these commentated selections from Lowell’s massive body of writings, never before published.
Lowell was a respected educator and took an active role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. For Mande Episode 1, I’ve pulled excerpts from Words with My Father that reflect Lowell’s personal experience with the turning tides of mid-century America. The photographs included below are by Lowell Klessig himself.
The Traumas of 1968
Lowell Klessig
1968 was the most intense year of my life. Getting a master’s degree from Vanderbilt University, a teaching certificate from George Peabody College and several job offers to teach high school chemistry seemed incidental in contrast to the immorality of Vietnam, my own draft status, and the unfolding political dramas in the USA and China.
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee had a good reputation. Some called it the “Harvard of the South.” I wasn’t there long enough to know if it deserved that title. Most of the coursework in my graduate school courses at Vanderbilt was material I had already gone through in Madison.
While I didn’t learn much more about biochemistry during the year in Nashville and didn’t take the teaching positions I no longer needed, I learned a great deal about regional differences, Southern racism, and national politics.
First, I learned that the issue of whether restaurants could discourage patrons from bringing their own alcohol (aka “brown-bagging it”) was more important to most Christians in the Bible Belt than racism in America, homicide by napalm in Vietnam, or poverty around the world. The allowing of brown-bagging ignited the city of Nashville in the late sixties – the issue created Christian support coalitions, town halls of thousands, petition drives and media campaigns. Endless infighting and media coverage of the battle for booze stifled reports from Vietnam, Civil Rights news and concerns about survival conditions here and abroad.
I had been a Lutheran all my life. I loved Nashville and its citizens. However, I could not stomach or comprehend the city’s religious establishment and thousands of its inhabitants who would choose to ignore the most important issue of their lifetimes and argue endlessly about their ridiculous brown bags instead.
Despite the churches’ – even many Black churches’ – fixation on their drinking rights, their bickering could not fully obscure the city’s racial tensions. In Nashville, I learned just how insidious and how ugly racism can be. I had been involved in efforts to further racial equality in my hometown of Chilton, in Madison and Milwaukee, and in St. Louis.
Still, I was not prepared for the racism I found in Nashville. I was not prepared for the death – the assassination – the murder – of Dr. King that Thursday in April 1968. The response to the Reverend’s demise upset me to no end.
The riots by Blacks in many cities after the King assassination were terrible and caused more harm to Blacks than to Whites. However, it was the behavior of the neighbors in the apartment next door, with whom we had a friendly relationship, which shocked us the most. When I heard the announcement of King’s death, I sort of exited reality. I just fell back into the bed in our little apartment and tried to avoid consciousness. Sometime later, through the bedroom wall, I heard loud noises coming from the apartment next door. I pulled myself up to the headboard and listened through the wall. My neighbors had thrown an impromptu party to celebrate King’s death.
There was nothing we could do to stop the party or even block out the thought of our nice neighbors celebrating a national tragedy. If we called the police, what would the police charge the revelers with? In Nashville and many other places in the South, the police might join the party.
We put the TV on to drown out the party noise. At midnight, the mayor of Nashville addressed the Black citizens of the city. After offering half-hearted condolences for the loss of their leader, the mayor had stern messages for the Black people in Nashville: an ordering of a dusk-to-dawn curfew and an announcement that National Guard troops had already deployed to the city streets. “Nashville will not be Memphis,” he said. The mayor was referring to the riots there earlier in the day. Our kitchen window faced Broadway Street. I looked down the street. The mayor wasn’t kidding. I could see the personnel carriers patrolling our street. They would drive the length of the street every hour for the next several days.
As Northerners, Lois and I felt isolated. We called other graduate students from the North. Between patrols, we would sneak to each other’s apartments. We wanted to grieve with people with similar values. We ate and slept together for the duration of the curfew, which lasted until after King’s funeral.
While I watched troops roll up and down the streets, I decided I needed to attend the funeral in Atlanta. I had missed the biggest Civil Rights rally in D.C. and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at that historic gathering. His funeral was my last chance to pay homage to one of the truly great people of my lifetime.
The Black churches in Nashville had pooled resources to rent a bus and put an announcement on the radio that anyone was welcome to ride. In violation of the curfew, the bus would depart at 2 a.m. on the day of the funeral. Even racist police probably would not arrest a busload of funeral goers. I was less sure how the police would treat a single Caucasian from the North out in the streets after curfew. If I wanted to go, I had to take my chances. I had to drive downtown, the full length of Broadway Street, to board the bus.
As I started down Broadway, I recited my story, the story I would give to the police or National Guard officer if they stopped me. Would I tell the truth? Would I tell them that I was on my way to Dr. King’s funeral? No way! If I did, I might end up at the bottom of a lake.
Having Wisconsin license plates on the car wouldn’t help either, even under other circumstances. Wisconsin license plates were almost synonymous with “nigger lover” because a vocal group of Wisconsinites was known at Vanderbilt for their participation in the Freedom Rides and Freedom Marches. I was a part time and less outspoken member of that group, but other members always warned me to stay cool if I was involved in a car accident or other incident because half of Tennesseans carried firearms in their vehicles.
Fortunately, I never got shot at in Tennessee or even threatened with a gun. However, the prevalence of guns was both amazing and disquieting. Also amazing was the number, over 20, of major bank hold-ups in Nashville during the 12 months we were there – too many to give TV coverage to unless somebody got hurt – or a brown bag of booze was involved. Perhaps there is a correlation between the number of guns, the intensity of brown bag incidents and the frequency of bank robberies.
I did get shot at in Mississippi a few months prior. I don’t know if the shooter saw the Wisconsin license plate on my car. I did not fully see the shooter, but I am sure he was standing in or behind the corner of an aging, unpainted farm building near the highway. The glint of a long steel tube flashed and disappeared as I scanned the structure – almost certainly a rifle barrel. There were no other cars in sight. The bullets hit the right side of my windshield at an angle and ricocheted off as the road and the car curved away from the building. I didn’t stop to investigate. I did not stop at the local police station. I headed straight to the relative safety of Nashville – a few hours away.
I was thinking about that day in Mississippi as I drove to catch the bus for King’s funeral. Perhaps those were warning shots. Perhaps I should have learned that these guys are serious about race. In Nashville that night, driving to the Black Baptist Church where the chartered bus waited for riders to Atlanta, I didn’t feel safe at all. Even less safe than the moments after being shot at in Mississippi when I wanted to speed back to the “safety” of Nashville but knew I dare not exceed the speed limit. I even felt in greater danger than when multiple marines rolled up on me in Washington D.C. after the March on the Pentagon.
The drive to the bus seemed to proceed in slow motion, time slowing down and my pulse increasing as I passed each cross street without seeing a single other person outside or any other cars in motion.
I passed two military jeeps with their lights off about a mile into my trip. Four guardsmen leaning against the green tailgates were puffing on cigarettes. I did not see their eyes, just the smoldering ends of their smokes.
I’ve never been more frightened than I was driving the next few blocks. As I turned right onto the street where the funeral bus was parked, I determined that the Jeeps had not followed me.
Even so, I kept rehearsing my story. If I got stopped for violating the curfew, I would express surprise and tell the patrolman that I had noticed that there were no other cars on the road, but I wasn’t aware of a curfew. I would tell the officer that I had tried to drive to Florida straight through from Wisconsin but had gotten too tired to continue, so I had pulled off the Interstate. Then, I would continue my tale, explaining that I decided to come downtown to sleep in a traditional hotel near the Grand Ole Opry, and that I would be much obliged if he could tell me where I could find such a hotel in his wonderful city.
Thankfully, I never found out whether I could pretend ignorance and tell such a lie successfully. I found the church, parked my car where the license plates would be least obvious, and boarded the bus. Twelve rows of white eyes and one white face greeted me. The bus was filled with perhaps fifty people. Two of us were white – both Northern students.
I took the window seat beside the white student. What happened in the next few minutes has haunted me for the rest of my life. Every five minutes for the half hour before the bus left for Atlanta, an open-backed personnel carrier with about a dozen soldiers patrolled past the bus. The soldiers sat facing outward – with fixed bayonets. Their eyes and bayonets and our eyes, many red with tears, were only separated by inches and a simple pane of glass. At the same time, we were a world apart. I can still close my eyes and bring that moment back, nearer than any experience except the birth of our children.
We left and made it to Atlanta. Though security was also tight, Atlanta felt cosmopolitan and sympathetic. Daylight and tens of thousands of fellow mourners contributed to the transition away from the scariest night of my life.
Massive numbers of people in sorrow gathered in Atlanta for Dr. King’s funeral, including numerous politicians, luminaries and Bobby Kennedy, candidate for President. The funeral procession would move on foot from City Hall to First Baptist Ebenezer Church where Reverend King and his father had served. As a presidential candidate, Bobby Kennedy was guarded by Secret Service agents but couldn’t resist reaching out to the crowd of mostly Black folks who largely respected Bobby and his deceased brother.
Occasionally, RFK would step out of the line and shake a few hands. The crowds along the route wanted to cheer and clap as he passed by, but that seemed inappropriate at a funeral procession. Instead, there was a continuous, low-level, suppressed applause as we walked by. To our surprise, shortly after it started, RFK’s contingent chose a spot in the procession right next to our group. For much of the way to the church, I walked right next to Bobby – two feet away from the man who now carried the hopes of millions on his shoulders.
Having seen the anguish and perplexion on his face that day in Atlanta, heightened I am sure by the memories of the assassination of his brother Jack, made the next national tragedy, on the night of the 1968 California Primary, more poignant and more personal to me. Just a couple of months after Dr. King’s funeral procession – on the night he won the California Democratic Primary and almost certainly the Presidency of the United States in the general election to follow – Bobby was gunned down.
Jack and Bobby Kennedy also had a dream for a better world. Bobby had served as U.S. Attorney General and was his brother’s closest confidant. Together they created the Peace Corps and overruled the generals who were willing to risk a nuclear war with the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba. After JFK’s assassination and despite the obvious danger to his own life, Bobby accepted the torch passed by his brother. On June 5, 1968, the dream, created by two young brothers with a unique blend of idealism and realism, rich guys who genuinely cared about poor people, was shattered. The optimism of the under thirty generation in the 1960s was never to be seen or heard again in our adult lives.
The dreamers, the kids who came of age in the 1960s and flocked to the Peace Corps, Partners of Americans, and public service careers at home, the kids who marched on the Pentagon and in other anti-Vietnam War protests, the kids who rode the Freedom Buses to teach illiterate Blacks how to register to vote in Mississippi and the kids who began the Environmental Movement, lost so much of their motivation and their faith in American institutions. It never returned – a dire consequence of the Vietnam War, violent and festering racism and three devastating assassinations.
Frustration with the inability of a political system to stop a war that had become unpopular and rage over the assassination of the Presidential candidate who would surely have brought our troops home, boiled to an ugly fury at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. After widespread civil disobedience, riots and arrests, Vice President Hubert Humphrey received the nomination over Eugene McCarthy who I had campaigned for in three states. Expecting that violence that would rattle Chicago and expecting that McCarthy would lose, I didn’t attend the Convention.
Meanwhile in China, Chairman Mao, and later the Gang of Four, inspired the Cultural Revolution that unleashed Red Guard youths to destroy thousands of years of Chinese cultural artifacts. They closed universities and sent professors to be “re-educated” in the rice patties. In a hyper-egalitarian fit, the young Red Guards roamed the country wantonly destroying all vestiges of status and success in a society that had been a one-party communist state for a generation. They encouraged local discontented comrades to “call down” (discredit, remove and ostracize) their leaders as “capitalist roaders.” The Red Guards elevated left-wing ideology beyond extremism to absurdity.
1968 belonged to the forces of evil and chaos. It was their finest year.
Reflections 4
Lukas Klessig
Activism of Various Shades
As we just read, the Vietnam war loomed as the event that triggered Dad’s political awakening and shaped his future political direction. The controversial conflict entirely reformed his perspective on world affairs, his outlook on his role in them and the importance of independent critical thinking.
But what he doesn’t say, at least not explicitly, is that his involvement in antiwar activism really set the trajectory for a life of action. The war didn’t just transform how he thought – it changed what he did.
Dad was always both a thinker and a doer. This combination made him such a great force in the world. Though he proved himself brilliant in a career in academia and environmental thought leadership, what he actually did in the real world seemed to make him most proud. He sometimes did seclude himself in self-made ivory towers, but only to refine his ideas on how to actually take action on the ground below.
This proclivity for getting things done started at a young age, ingrained in him as the eldest son of a conservative, task-oriented dairy farmer who taught him the merit of elbow grease. My father’s upbringing happened on a farm where to be a child was to work, every day, with few breaks.
The duty to labor didn’t govern just Dad’s family farm, but also his whole community and heritage. He came from a long line of devout Lutherans whose daily lives mirrored strongly held religious beliefs about work and everything else. Dad brought much of that doctrine with him when he first went off to college in Madison.
Rather typically, he was, like most youth from tight-knit communities of the era, a product of his environment. His rural, conservative, Lutheran community had imparted their cultural values. That community was skeptical of, and hostile to, radical politics, so Dad was as well. As a young man, it was all he knew.
The politics of the time – radical or otherwise – also became defined by the Civil Rights Movement and the conservative reaction against it. His childhood community didn’t debate racial issues much. They followed the conservative platform and what they heard in churches about distant disruptions. Very few were white supremacists or overtly racist. But they were conservatives and the rapid and sweeping changes demanded by the Civil Rights activists seemed dangerous and risky. Upsetting the systems and constructs of the post-World War II boom threatened their treasured stability.
Those opposing the Civil Rights Movement ultimately ended up on the wrong side of history, but that’s not how many people approached the issue at the time. They didn’t want activists, however virtuous, rocking the boat of a prosperous, pacified and patriotic era. That conservatism message surrounded my father (excepting a few liberal points to ponder from his Grandpa Walter) before he ventured to Madison for college.
An Antiwar Heritage
While the rural community where my father grew up remained opposed to “radical” politics and social movements, including the anti-war protests, aversion to war had, in fact, determined that community’s own geography, vocations and identity. This seemingly contradictory perspective has deep historical roots.
My paternal family’s ancestors began emigrating to the United States from Germany in the late nineteenth century. This era of the German Confederation saw militaristic Kaisers waging almost continual war and conquest to consolidate land and power within the nascent German state. Our ancestors didn’t possess nobility or privilege that protected them from conscription. They didn’t want to be soldiers. They were mostly farmers who raised animals, not animosity toward their neighbors, near or far. They wouldn’t accept seeing their sons and brothers die to advance the conquering schemes of combative demagogues. For this reason, they left Germany to escape the machine of German aggression – to start new lives in America.
Throughout the eras of Prussian remnants, the Kaisers, the brief Weimar state and the rise of the Nazis, they continued to leave, generations of Klessigs (and similar Germans) fleeing brutal and bellicose strongmen.
Being farmers by skill and birth, most of them settled in Wisconsin, a place of plentiful land and abundant water. They started their own family farms and bought vast swaths of cheap, sometimes subsidized, land. This pattern of settlement by central and northern Europeans looking for better and safer lives, made the Midwest and Plains the “breadbasket” of America.
In a sense, my father came from a long line of “draft dodgers.” Decades before Dad rushed to attain deferments to avoid the Vietnam draft, his father evaded fighting on the front lines of World War II by contributing food to the war effort as a farmer. My father was born a few months before that war ended, a birth possibly only realized because his parents’ farm waiver meant my grandpa didn’t die in Normandy or in the depths of the Pacific.
Though their contributions of food and supplies mattered significantly to the Allies’ victory, those in the community who weren’t drafted stayed home and kept their heads down. They weren’t unpatriotic and didn’t want to appear as such. Even so, their allegiance lay first to their families and their land and their farms. They had grown weary of war and death and imperialism.
This general repulsion for war-mongering and blind patriotism became part of our family lore. As far as I know, my grandfather never expressed guilt for staying home while others fought and died. My father certainly never did. Disdain for (and skepticism of) armed conflict had instilled itself so much that it became a crucial aspect of their and their community’s identity. The horrors of the World Wars and the Holocaust brought shame and intentional separation from being German. They were now German-Americans who would protect them- selves from what seemed like endless militarism and bloodshed. I don’t think we can fault them for that.
Nonetheless, there arises the irony, the contradiction, of how unfavorably the same community viewed the antiwar movement in the Vietnam era. They didn’t necessarily support the conflict in Vietnam, but they had become conservative, mollified by prosperity and their establishment as “Americans.” Their lingering distaste for war didn’t stop them from criticism of the antiwar movement, which most viewed as culturally radical and disruptive to the status quo. They had established quiet and stable lives in the new country and these protestors seemed threatening, the results of their actions uncertain. The conservative community that Dad knew wanted no association with the alternative lifestyles and activist agitators their clergy warned them about in church basements.
While my father’s community did not judge him for taking the deferments that kept him out of Vietnam, they would not have looked favorably on his antiwar activism and alleged hippie conspirators. They didn’t want their children going off to die in foreign lands, but they also didn’t want them joining protest movements or questioning the politics and complacency of their elders.
Of course, that’s exactly what Dad ultimately did.
An Awakening
Dad didn’t arrive on campus with counter-culture fervor or activist ambitions. His views and attitudes largely resembled those of the people back in his rural Wisconsin community. Showing up in Madison in the 1960s must have resulted in quite a culture shock. Only 100 miles to the southwest of the family farm, the burgeoning status of Madison as a hotbed of radical and civic action must had made it appear like a different world entirely. The antiwar and civil rights demonstrations led by counterculture students and “hippies” initially drew Dad’s scorn for disrupting his classes and interrupting his orientation to “college zest.” They were an affront to the advanced education experience he had come to obtain. Perhaps, they wrought such havoc as communist agitators weakening the country from within. He had heard of such infiltrators back home, especially at card tables in church basements and at the seed store counter.
While some people never question their own beliefs, Dad relished new information, different viewpoints, reexamination. Though many would have simply gritted their teeth and ignored the protestors, Dad’s intellectual curiosity couldn’t just dismiss them. They had specific demands about the war in Vietnam. Communist indoctrination never surfaced as the agenda for their activism. Dad didn’t know much about the nation or region, so he went to the library and started studying the history of southeast Asia and American entanglements around the world.
As would become his practice, critical thinking transformed how he saw the war, the protests and the protestors. Dad realized his information was, at best, incomplete and, largely, incorrect. He hadn’t fully understood what we were trying to accomplish in Vietnam – and he still didn’t, but now it wasn’t simply out of ignorance. The protestors, he realized, were on the right side of history. The war in Vietnam, he realized was unjust. More troops, more napalm, more defense spending, more soldiers sent to early graves or ravaged by depression or PTSD, more children disfigured by landmines and poisoned by agent orange, more dead Vietcong and a generation of regret would not produce a benevolent outcome. Through learning and critical thought, Dad came to terms with just how utterly destructive and senseless the violence in Vietnam was.
That my father would experience such a revelation with his nose in a pile of books at the library and then in a beer glass surrounded by protestors and returned draftees should surprise no one that knew him. He was truly intellectually rigorous and open-minded in a way that few are, especially these days. That capacity to learn, discern, verify, recognize the flaws and gaps in his thinking and change his mind became a defining feature of his life and his activism and a conduit for his contributions.