The 1969 Parkhurst Hall Takeover

By John Bruce | Monday, August 11, 2008

Editor’s Note: TDR presents the final installment of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.

Tuesday, May 6, 1969, was a golden spring day, the best weather I can remember in Hanover. Only the SDS and its hard-core sympathizers were indoors, having just taken over Parkhurst Hall. That included Larry Burlingame, as well as Al Salzman, Bob Stone, and about 72 others. A large crowd gathered outside Parkhurst, watching in more or less idle curiosity. There was a carnival atmosphere, in fact. Everyone dropped by to have a look between classes or errands. It was a good time for graduating seniors, like me, to catch up with acquaintances one last time.

The Dartmouth Review published in 2005 what appears to be the most complete account of what happened inside Parkhurst during the takeover. I wasn’t inside, though I naturally heard varying accounts at second and third hand. The version in the Review generally supports what I heard:

[A]s violent take-overs go, the seizure of Parkhurst was exceptionally well-mannered. Before storming the building, the protestors took a vote on their action. Once inside, they left Waldo “Spike” Chamberlain undisturbed; it was rumored he had a heart condition, and so, wary of giving him a fright, students let him keep working in the basement and leave at 4 o’clock as scheduled.

[David] Green ‘71 [a ringleader] took to the megaphone only after calling his lacrosse coach to let him know he wouldn’t be at practice that afternoon. Later on, three occupiers left, only to return after taking an exam for Daniell’s history class. It seems they were participating in the workings of the very institution they were protesting against, but the test was on the American Revolution. The papers reported that students were kind enough to deposit their cigarette butts in ashtrays, and an inventory from the following morning shows postage stamps, eight concert tickets, and ten dollars’ worth of silverware from the ladies’ lounge were among the few items that had gone missing.

The accounts are also consistent on what the College’s chief administrators, who were in the building, did when it began: President John Sloan Dickey immediately left under his own steam, shouting “Get out of my way!” to the invaders. This might seem a virile response; certainly the accounts of the episode suggest it was what Dickey had in mind. But there’s also a certain Gallic quality to Dickey’s heroism: “Get out of my way!” is what the French colonel shouts, in the old joke, to those of his troops who are tardy in retreat.

Contrast Dickey’s behavior with Albert I. Dickerson in the same situation on the same day. As the protesters entered his office, by all accounts, Dickerson remained seated. He refused to move. And he refused to move, one 60-year-old guy, a heavy smoker, maybe 5-10, 175 pounds, in the face of what must have been twelve or twenty purposeful students. No band of thugs was going to frighten him into the halls and out the door, no matter what he yelled to make it look like he wasn’t running away. They had to pick up Dickerson’s chair and carry him, still seated, bodily out of the building. I assume that, in refusing to move, he’d been ready for less satisfactory outcomes.

Which administrator, I put it to the reader, swung the syllabic Dick at the forepart of his surname with greater justice? I simply don’t know if Larry was one of the students who carried the hated Inskip out. I’m glad, at least, that I wasn’t one of them, but I suspect Dickerson already knew I wouldn’t be.

Dean of the College Thaddeus Seymour, a much younger, more robust man than either Dickey or Dickerson, gave this version of events as of a 1977 interview:

I had my right arm kind in a hammer lock on David Green and we were going down to the basement of Parkhurst. They were going to push us out the back … I think to myself, “My God I was prepared to kill him … The passion of all this was such that I could have just as gladly banged his head in.[“]

Nobody in the SDS could have taken Seymour, I guarantee you. But even passive resistance from a guy like Seymour would have, it seems to me, been hard to overcome. They had to carry Dickerson out of the building in his chair, after all. What if Seymour had wedged himself into a doorframe?

In fact, the danger of second-guessing aside, this has been a question at the back of my mind ever since I spent time in corporate environments, sometimes looking at security related issues. It’s the job of any management, which would include a college administration, to provide for the continuity of the organization. This includes functions like protecting vital records from destruction, and one source of destruction is civil disturbance. This is all Book I, Chapter 1 of how to be a manager. A corporation must have up-to-date contingency plans for what to do if a band of the disgruntled proposes to invade headquarters, with a likely view toward either destroying or breaching the confidentiality of vital records. If you don’t have such a thing, your auditors and regulators will point it out.

And once I became familiar with the obligations managers have in such matters, I couldn’t help but toy idly with the question of why Dartmouth was apparently supine in the face of such a takeover. The College, you understand, wasn’t at the forefront of student protest and violence. Berkeley had shown the way for years, and the Columbia takeover, a much more serious event, had happened a year earlier. How did it happen that 75 students, poorly organized, largely unathletic, and armed only with a bullhorn, gained entry to the administration building in a mob and were able to take possession?

‘Dad Thad’s’ position has mellowed, too. In a recent interview, he says:

It was certainly the most challenging experience of my career and in a way the most wrenching. But as I look back on it, I am mindful that the students involved were committed to their cause and history. Even [Robert] McNamara agreed that they were right, and I respect that and I have always respected their commitment.

Wait a second here. In an earlier interview, he says he was ready to bash heads, and now if McNamara says the kids were right, he’s got to respect their commitment? And let’s keep in mind that the man who insists he’s not the model for Dean Wormer didn’t just fight down the urge to bash heads. He handed out much College Discipline against the protesters. Does he take it all back now? This is part of the Dartmouth conundrum, it seems to me: an administration that once opposed the takeover of a College building is 35 years later ambivalent about it to say the least. Even if, as has been rumored, John Sloan Dickey was opposed in pectore to the war, he and the rest of the administration had a responsibility, which they didn’t follow, to protect the College’s assets.

They avoided violence, they didn’t create martyrs, and they successfully protected the SDS from the full consequences of its action, but they were also just plain lucky that nobody trashed Parkhurst or that nobody went fishing for anything of interest in the files. But then, Dickey and Seymour were both, as they say, short-timers at that point. Whatever the outcome of the takeover, they were out of there. This may have affected their planning.

In fact, the aftermath of the takeover seems more like some kind of research project for an honors thesis, a spring lark, rather than crime and punishment:

. . . immediate public and alumni response to the administrators’ action was overwhelmingly laudatory. Even the parents of some of the incarcerated applauded the College’s tactics; “we believe his conduct was a result of immaturity and misguided idealism rather than of malicious or criminal intent,” wrote one.

Life seemed to proceed with surprising normality, even for those students who were jailed. The College allowed them to complete their coursework and even assigned a faculty member or administrator to oversee the inmates at each jail.

Among those students who were jailed was my friend Larry. The outcome for those who were in the building reflects, as I see it, something of his character.

In the words of Bill Pacht ‘67, who met his now-wife when she came to visit a classmate, the fervor of May 6 died quickly:

There’s no political action you can take in jail. We were writing manifestos for the first three days—it was like jerking off! Nobody pays any attention to you in jail. So you smoke cigarettes and you read.

In fact, the Parkhurst takeover, while a prominent event in College history, is thoroughly reflective of what radical politics were really about in the 1960s: a bunch of privileged white guys sacrificing little and accomplishing nothing. Despite the jail time, despite the calls to the family lawyers, the takeover had no effect on the College’s decision, already taken, to phase out the ROTC. There doesn’t appear to have been any consideration given to the quixotic demand that it kick the ROTC off campus immediately. Nor could anyone have reasonably expected this outcome. This, to me, is another bit of the bigger puzzle.

Beyond that, one context of the takeover is inevitably the fate of the SDS itself: only a month later, in June 1969, Bernadine Dohrn and her supporters, in a sort of turnabout, seized the SDS national headquarters and expelled the existing SDS staff and membership, presumably including Al Salzman and Bob Stone. She then reconstituted the SDS as the Weathermen, and it no longer concerned itself with taking over administration buildings or the ROTC. Thus the Parkhurst takeover was something of a last hurrah for the rich-white-boy school of 1960s radicalism. We’re lucky that when the Weathermen turned from making gestures to making bombs, they proved to be just as feckless.

In making a final try to assess the whole conundrum here, I’m going to use a neglected tool, but it’s been used in connection with at least one past mystery: the Flitcraft parable in The Maltese Falcon.

Flitcraft appears in a seeming digression in The Maltese Falcon, a real estate agent who “owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.” One day he disappears, leaving behind his business, his wife, and his children. Five years later, Mrs. Flitcraft sends Sam Spade to Spokane, where a man resembling her husband is living “He had an automobile-business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season.”

In other words, he left a predictable bourgeois life in one small city to take up a nearly identical, predictable bourgeois life in another. “[W]hat he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he could make that reasonableness clear to Spade.” One day on his way to lunch, a beam fell from a building under construction and hit the sidewalk right next to him. “He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.” A good conformist, Flitcraft suddenly realized that he was out of step with life, which is apparently, instead of the predictable affair he’d assumed, completely random. He decided then that he had to conform to this randomness.

“For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. . . . ‘[T]hat’s the part of it I always liked’.” said Spade. “’He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.’”

About a dozen years after I left Dartmouth, I was at a low point. I’d spent five years in graduate school and left without a PhD. Then I worked at a series of technical writing jobs. The only good part about that was at least I could call myself a writer of sorts. Somehow I couldn’t get my romantic life together, when earlier there’d been no problem.

For some reason, I wanted to get hold of Bill McMann, whom I hadn’t seen since I visited him in New York during my sophomore year. Maybe I figured if I could chat with Bill once again, I might get a new perspective and find a better direction. I tried the Dartmouth alumni office, but they’d lost track of him. They did, though, have Larry Burlingame’s address. He hadn’t moved far from where he’d grown up: another wealthy enclave, across the bay from the first one. I’d crossed the country in the meantime.

I wrote him a letter, bringing him up to date, and asking if he had any information on Bill McMann. In reply, he sent a postcard with a copy of the Van Gogh painting Gaugin’s Chair. It shows an empty chair with books and a candle in it, a reference, clearly, to the absent Bill. The message on the back read as follows:

Hi, John, the last I heard, Bill was in Providence, Rhode Island. Don’t know anything else. After Dartmouth I was a hippie plumber in Santa Cruz, then a labor organizer, and now I’m a vice president in my father’s company. I’m married with two kids. Best wishes, Larry.

The Van Gogh on the front of the card was a nice touch. That was Larry. You couldn’t get a card like that down at the corner drug store. Had he gone to the museum gift shop himself? Still, there was something cold about the reply that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Somehow it was saying I’m being a nice guy and sending you something special and giving you all this extra information, but I could nevertheless picture the old grimace, the old look past the distant horizon that said he wasn’t quite there, and I wasn’t quite getting it. I didn’t contact him again after that.

And I didn’t think about his abbreviated CV until much later. I did, though, get hold of Bill McMann: he was in the Providence phone book. I called him late one night, in the manner of our earlier chats. He didn’t seem to mind. His Bronx accent had mutated into a New England twang. He’d already been married and divorced. He told me little else about himself.

The odd thing about the talk we had over the phone was how little had changed. I was ready, it seemed, to confess everything that had gone wrong with my life. He was ready to tell me everything I should do with it. In fact, he had an agenda for me, just like in the old times in Hinman Hall. Somehow this wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I’d had some crazy idea about dealing with my life as it was, a dozen years older but not much wiser, and Bill wanted to play from some script I’d mostly forgotten.

On the other hand, it took a while for what Larry told me about his life on the postcard to sink in. It probably took over ten years for it to sink in, in fact, though that’s because I wasn’t thinking that hard about it. Doesn’t everyone get to be a VP in the family business when he gets tired of being a hippie plumber or a labor organizer? Somehow I must have been thinking about Flitcraft one day, and something fell into place. Larry started out as a rich kid named F. Laurence Burlingame IV. Then he went to Dartmouth, and something happened to him, a little bit like a beam falling right next to him on the sidewalk. Let’s call it ‘education’, for want of a better word, though whatever it was, it didn’t really take.

Larry had come up with the Green Bummer, which was the idea that if there wasn’t something else that could be found besides the formalities, the structures, the externals of going to Dartmouth, the reality was pretty unpleasant. But somewhere in the mysticism, the drugs, the radical politics, he’d missed it, even if he knew in some way what he was missing. “But what’s the matter with that?” someone will certainly ask. “After all, he’s happy.” Maybe that’s the problem. Flitcraft was a happy guy.

For a while, he didn’t seem like a rich kid. He got to be a hippie, he got to be a radical, he got to play Thoreau in the county jail (though maybe a little longer than he wanted to); then he got to play around in Santa Cruz, which is still hippie nirvana; and then he got to play at being a labor organizer. But no more beams fell, and he adjusted to beams not falling. He went back to being F. Laurence Burlingame IV, and he got to be a VP in the family business.

I googled Larry not long ago: he wasn’t easy to find. The family business is quite large, and its profile is very low; you’ve got to make a lot of tries with different combinations of Larry and Laurence and Burlingame and the name of the business (which has nothing to do with Burlingame) to find him at all. He’s still there, of course. Turgid corporatespeak prose goes out over his name, but I’m betting someone else writes it.

I guess that, in contacting Larry and Bill, I was making a first effort at revisiting Dartmouth. I was at a low point then because I’d been matching what I’d actually accomplished with what I thought I should have been doing. What, after all, had Dartmouth done for me? Not much that I could put my finger on.

On the other hand, I think back to the question Albert Dickerson posed to Bill McMann: “What do you want to get from this place?” There was an implication here, which was echoed in the talks I had with him, that an education was something you had to reach out for, not acquire passively. For that matter, Prof. Jeffrey Hart has been quoted in these pages to the effect that it’s possible to get an education at Dartmouth, but a student has to work hard to do it. For my part, I’d wanted a degree only insofar as it told me I was free to leave. Classes were, as often as not, an obstacle to getting the education I wanted. But by indirection, and sometimes by accident, I think I managed to get an education at Dartmouth, and in fact about as good a one as can be had.

I majored in English, though you wouldn’t have known it from how badly I did when I took the Graduate Record Exam. That was OK, I made up for it in graduate school (I didn’t exactly wind up at a top-five university). What I did take away from Dartmouth was a sense, not fully conscious and not fully formed, that if Greek, Jewish, and Christian philosophy tended to agree that there was an organizing principle behind the universe that might be called logos, then writing was something centrally important. I came to Dartmouth thinking I wanted to be a writer. By the time I left, I had evidence that suggested I shouldn’t be one, and I certainly still didn’t have anything to write about. But I was more convinced than I’d ever been that writing, whether I was suited to it or not, was something eminently worth doing.

Dartmouth is a contradictory and confusing place. It represents itself as a pastoral Arcadia, but its campus plan comes from the City Beautiful movement. Its student ethos is egalitarian, but it’s also a bastion of old-time privilege. The narcissism implicit in the portrait of David McLaughlin that we saw at the start of this series is a pervasive part of the institutional culture. I said at the start that I hated the place, but there’s also something in it to love.

The 1969 Parkhurst Hall Takeover

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