Gene R. Garthwaite
Dartmouth College Oral History Program
The Dartmouth Vietnam Project
August 21 and 31, 2015
Transcribed by Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft
[PATRICK A.]
DELLINGER: All right, so it is August—
GARTHWAITE: Twenty-first.
DELLINGER: —21st, 2015, and I’m here—my name is Patrick [A.] Dellinger. I’m here with Professor Gene [R.] Garthwaite at the Rauner [Special Collections] Library in Hanover, New Hampshire.
I’m glad to have you here. So to start off, can you just give us a quick background: where you were born, when and where, your family?
GARTHWAITE: Okay. I was born in southwestern Wisconsin, in a small town called Mount Hope, of all places. It’s an actual place. On the 15th of July 1933. And I lived there briefly, where all the Garthwaites were from. And then my father moved to Dubuque, Iowa, where we lived briefly, then Decorah, Iowa, and then, during World War II, St. Paul, Minnesota. And then after that, we moved to Rochester, Minnesota. So I sort of regard Rochester as—as my hometown, although I continued to have close ties to Wisconsin, but that was pretty much—
I went to St. Olaf College then, in Minnesota. Was in ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] during the Korean War, the [U.S.] Air Force ROTC, then after graduation went to the Air Force, where I was trained to be a [Boeing] B-47 [Stratojet] bombardier, radar operation and navigator. And ultimately, when I was combat ready, I had my own atomic weapon and a target in the Soviet Union.
And then after I finished the Air Force, then I started a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Chicago, where I had a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. And over the summer—you know, in that area, your stipend didn’t include summer—
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: —I got a job as a go-fer for this very large archaeological expedition that was leaving for Iran at the end of the summer. And three days before the expedition left Chicago, the camp manager—because of the size of the expedition, they needed a professional camp manager, but their camp manager became ill, and they asked me to go in her place.
And so I did not take my prelims. I did not go on to a job in Oregon, and I went to Iran instead, where we lived for nine months. Traveled in Europe, came back to the United States without any money and needed a job.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So just going back to—to your growing up, I’d like to—like to talk about that in a little more detail.
GARTHWAITE: Sure.
DELLINGER: So what were your parents’ names?
GARTHWAITE: My father was Ralph [A.] Garthwaite, and my mother was Merle Quarne [Garthwaite], and she—the Garthwaites, of course, were of English descent. The Quarnes were Norwegian. And so my maternal grandparents lived—also lived in Wisconsin but on a dairy farm in west-central Wisconsin.
DELLINGER: And what did your parents do for a living?
GARTHWAITE: My father was a—in wholesale plumbing and heating, and my mother, before she married, was a home economics teacher.
DELLINGER: Did you have any brothers or sisters?
GARTHWAITE: I had two sisters.
DELLINGER: And their names?
GARTHWAITE: Beverly [Garthwaite Fisher] is my elder sister, and Elsie [Garthwaite Boss], my younger sister.
DELLINGER: And were they older than you or younger?
GARTHWAITE: Beverly was two years—about two years older than I was, and Elsie was about two years younger than I was, so I was the—the filling in the sandwich.
DELLINGER: That’s a nicely made family.
GARTHWAITE: Yeah.
DELLINGER: So you were moving around a lot as you grew up.
GARTHWAITE: Right.
DELLINGER: How did that affect you?
GARTHWAITE: I’m not sure. [Chuckles.] I certainly liked to travel, but we didn’t travel—I mean, we—the places that I’ve mentioned weren’t that far apart, actually, so I—but I regard myself fully as a Midwesterner, although I have been here long enough so that I’ve lost, I think, my Minnesota accent,—
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: —whereas my sisters still had—had that.
DELLINGER: Was your family close, growing up?
GARTHWAITE: Yes, it was. And I suppose in some ways—on the Garthwaite side, we had no cousins. On my mother’s side, we had a very large number of cousins. And so there was sort of this big, extended family there and a more—a smaller, probably more closely knit family on the Garthwaite side.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And about what age did you move to Rochester?
GARTHWAITE: High school.
DELLINGER: High school?
GARTHWAITE: Yeah.
DELLINGER: And was it tough to make friends there, or—
GARTHWAITE: Well, not really. You know, Rochester is the home of the Mayo Clinic, and in many ways it was the larger version of Hanover. It was sort of a one-company town, like Hanover is a one-company town. And the population is well educated, has strong cultural interests, like Hanover. I identified very strongly with Rochester, and my parents continued to live there so that when—after I finished college and then my Ph.D. and everything, Rochester was always home base.
DELLINGER: What are some—some of your interests as a kid?
GARTHWAITE: Well [chuckles], I was talking about this with a colleague the other day, and I think when I was in high school—do you still take the Kuder Preference Test?
DELLINGER: I don’t think so. No I don’t think—
GARTHWAITE: Well, anyway, it was a—when you were in high school, sort of it was something, a test you took that indicated where your interests would lie. And everybody in Rochester, of course, their interests were in medicine. But I was especially interested in veterinary medicine, although—God knows why.
But when I went to St. Olaf, in my freshman year I decided I was going to be an English major, and moreover I decided I was going to do a Ph.D. in English and become an academic.
DELLINGER: Interesting.
GARTHWAITE: I’d always liked reading.
DELLINGER: So you decided what you were kind of going to do with the rest of your life through college, not necessarily in high school or before then.
GARTHWAITE: Right, right. It was really in college, although I was—I was a strong student in high school. I really didn’t devel- —and I was an avid reader, and—but I really developed interest in literature then at St. Olaf. It was a very strong English department.
DELLINGER: So kind of a quiet high school, or did you play sports? Were you very academic or—were you just—?
GARTHWAITE: I—I suppose I did everything but play sports. [Chuckles.]
DELLINGER: Yeah. It’s definitely good to be a good reader. It’s obviously had a profound effect on your profession.
GARTHWAITE: Yeah.
DELLINGER: So how did you decide to go to St. Olaf?
GARTHWAITE: To be quite honest, I’m not sure. It’s the only college I applied to. I had visited St. Olaf and had liked it very much, and I had known others from Rochester who had gone there, so it was my first choice, and—in that era, it wasn’t that—far fewer went to college then, and I suppose it was sort of—you self-selected. You know, if you were interested in going to college, you sort of got in.
DELLINGER: Well, good for you. Did you decide to—to do ROTC before you went to college, or when you got there?
GARTHWAITE: Yes. I would have been drafted. This was during the Korean War, when there was a national draft.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And had I not been in ROTC, I would have been drafted. And St. Olaf only had Air Force ROTC. Consequently, I was in Air Force ROTC. My eyesight, especially my depth perception, which was so bad, disqualified me from becoming a pilot, but in the B-47 we were called—or in the Air Force we were called triple threats and the brain of the plane, because we did—we actually did all the mental work. The pilot and copilot of a B-47 only took the plane off and landed. And then refueled. Otherwise, they read comic books—
DELLINGER: [Chuckles softly.]
GARTHWAITE: —while I worked the entire 11- to 14-hour flights that we had.
DELLINGER: So you were ROTC out of necessity, for not getting drafted.
GARTHWAITE: Right, yeah, essentially.
DELLINGER: And did that have any effect on your college experience or your psyche?
GARTHWAITE: I suppose it did, but I—I was the top student in ROTC, but I was a very good student anyway. And I suppose in some ways, in that sense, I was a leader in ROTC. There were a lot of people in ROTC in that era, a very large number.
DELLINGER: Hmm. And what was it like being at St. Olaf? It’s a little bit secluded, isn’t it?
GARTHWAITE: No, it’s less so than Hanover. [Laughs.]
DELLINGER: Oh, wow!
GARTHWAITE: There’s Carlton [College] across the river, and I had high school friends that were at Carlton, and it’s 60 miles south of Minneapolis, so it’s about an hour drive. It’s probably less than 60 miles. But it’s an hour’s drive from Minneapolis, so—whereas the closest major city to Hanover is two and a half hours, Boston.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: So we had to—it wasn’t—it’s a small—it was a small community. St. Olaf was a small college.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: There were only a couple of hundred in—in my class. Carlton was even smaller. And in that—in that era, both Carlton and St. Olaf’s recruited largely in the Midwest.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: So the student bodies weren’t that different, and they weren’t that diverse.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: There were probably more from East Coast at Carlton than at St. Olaf.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: But it was a pretty—pretty much sort of a uniform student body at both places.
My mother’s family, as I mentioned earlier, was Norwegian, and, of course, St. Olaf has this Norwegian heritage, which was probably one factor why I ended up there.
Also interestingly, I have never studied Norwegian, and when I was at St. Olaf, if you had a Norwegian surname, then you were required to take Norwegian. And Garthwaite is not a Norwegian surname, so I—I didn’t—but, you know, I sort of wish that I had. My cousins on my mother’s side all grew up—my mother was the only one of six siblings to go to university, and she’s the only one to marry a non-Norwegian. And all of my cousins spoke Norwegian, and those that are still alive today still speak Norwegian in their community. But I never learned Norwegian.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
So you were obviously very involved in your studies and also ROTC. What did you—what did you do with the rest of your time at school?
GARTHWAITE: Well, I was the feature editor of the college newspaper, and I was that for several years, and that took up a fair amount of time, and I participated in other kinds of activities at St. Olaf. But I suppose most of them were—had a literary bent.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So you really fell in love with literature while at St. Olaf.
GARTHWAITE: Yeah, yeah.
DELLINGER: How did that come to be?
GARTHWAITE: I don’t know. My father in particular and the Garthwaites were great readers.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And it was just something that—
DELLINGER: Was in—
GARTHWAITE: —I always did, yeah.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
So after college, you’re assigned to a position in the Air Force?
GARTHWAITE: Right. Went immediately into the Air Force.
DELLINGER: Can you talk a little bit about that?
GARTHWAITE: Yeah. I spent a month, like everybody else, at Lackland Air Force Base [in Texas], where they sort of get all the paperwork together and assign you to your next training base, which was in California, in Sacramento, and it was in SAC, the Strategic Air Command, which was the choice career path had I stayed in the Air Force. And then my initial B-47 training was there.
And then I was assigned to what became known as McCoy Air [Force] Base in Florida, but it was in Orlando, which is now Orlando’s international airport, but that was a small but a major SAC base. And then assigned to a crew, and there, the crew trained together, sort of advanced engi- —advanced engineering.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So what was your training like? You were obviously trained to be a B-47—you called it a triple threat, right?
GARTHWAITE: Yeah, yeah.
DELLINGER: Was it very intense training?
GARTHWAITE: Very intense. And I suppose most of our time was spent with navigation. And believe it or not, I was trained to navigate with a sextant.
DELLINGER: Wow.
GARTHWAITE: Nobody is today. And so we had to learn the stars and how to shoot sun lines and that sort of thing. But the B-47 was a beautiful aircraft, but it was small and quite slow, and it had electronic equipment—and everything, of course, was doubled, but there was the fear that in combat, both systems might be knocked out, and therefore you had to learn the non-electronic methods of navigation, like shooting stars with a sextant.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And similarly, I took command of the aircraft on—on the run down—the bomb run, and I could release the bomb manually if necessary—again, if—if the electronics failed. So Dr. Strangelove[or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb], when I saw it, had a ring of truth to it. And I could actually crawl back into the bomb bay and arm the bomb manually if need be—again, if the electronics went out.
And we—our target from Florida was in the Soviet Union, and we refueled twice, once over the Atlantic [Ocean] and once over North Africa. There was no plan to refuel us on the way back.
DELLINGER: And why do you think that is?
GARTHWAITE: We weren’t going to make it back. I mean, the plane—the assumption was we’d run out of fuel and crash,—
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: —either over the Mediterranean [Sea] or Africa.
DELLINGER: And how did you deal with that?
GARTHWAITE: You didn’t give it much of a thought, really.
DELLINGER: You just hoped everything turned out well.
GARTHWAITE: Yeah. We carried blood—what was called a [blood chip?? 16:45], but it was a piece of silk that was maybe, oh, 16 by 16 inches, and on it, in many languages, were printed—you know, whoever found us and brought us back safely or as a body would be given $10,000.
DELLINGER: Wow.
GARTHWAITE: But you—you don’t think about those things.
DELLINGER: Was it—go ahead.
GARTHWAITE: Jonathan Mirsky [pronounced MERE-ski], who was a colleague of mine here at Dartmouth, who was very much involved in the antiwar business, always said that in the infantry, when they asked for ten volunteers and the ten volunteers are told, “Only one of you will come back,” they’ll still get ten volunteers because everybody assumes they’re going to be the one that comes back. But, again, it’s not something that we gave much thought to.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And how did you feel about carrying nuclear weapons?
GARTHWAITE: At that time, it was in the height of the Cold War. Again, we—we—I never—we—we had a lot of training, but I don’t ever recall we were asked to think about the ethics of what we were doing, or the morality of it. And that only—that only came later.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And what do you think about the ethics of it now?
GARTHWAITE: A big mistake, a big mistake historically. We just passed the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki [in Japan]. And as a child, I remember the end of the war very clearly and the headlines in the newspaper about this extraordinary new weapon and how exciting it was. But then there’s just—the horrific costs, and the lasting costs of it only came later.
DELLINGER: Did that inform your opinions on future wars at all?
GARTHWAITE: No, that—that really only happened when I was a graduate student.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And there, I was especially influenced by my Ph.D. adviser, Nicki [R.] Keddie, who was very much a product of the left. And my—the Garthwaites were—my grandfather Garthwaite used to talk about [Robert M.] “Bob” La Follette [Jr.]. Probably doesn’t ring any bells with you. Bob La Follette was the great progressive from Wisconsin in the 1920s, and a very important national politician, but very progressive. And in Minnesota, with the Scandinavian influence in particular, again, it was—politics were quite progressive.
And neither of my? sets of families were isolationists, but, again, it’s—I think everybody—the population as a whole sort of just accepted the status quo, pretty much, in terms of who the enemies were, in terms of World War II, and then how that was transferred then to the Soviet Union afterwards. And there wasn’t an awful lot of–of—of critical thought, even on the part of—you would think on the La Follette side in particular, that there would have been more criticism, but I don’t recall hearing that.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So very united.
What was the social culture like as a part of the military?
GARTHWAITE: Oh, a very hierarchical [chuckles], very hierarchical. And amusingly so. And heavily influenced by American Southern culture. The big bases were generally in the South, and my colleagues were—typically were—there were probably more Southerners than from other groups, although in my crew—I can’t remember where my pilot was from, but my copilot was from Iowa, so he was another Midwesterner.
DELLINGER: Okay. So what year did you graduate from college?
GARTHWAITE: Nineteen fifty-five.
DELLINGER: And then you were in the military for how long?
GARTHWAITE: Two and a half years. I was told—my—my tour of duty was initially for three years, and then during my second year, [the U.S.] Congress made major cuts [to] military spending. It was a wind-down from the Korean War. And we were told either to sign up for an indefinite tour of duty, which would have been 20 years, or to get out right away. And so I got out after two and a half years because I had a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship waiting for me in Chicago, so I knew quite clearly what I wanted to do.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And how did that come about?
GARTHWAITE: Academic record.
DELLINGER: Was it just given to you, or did you apply for it?
GARTHWAITE: Oh, yeah, I applied for it. Woodrow Wilsons were national graduate fellowships.
DELLINGER: So you knew you wanted to do English.
GARTHWAITE: That’s right, yeah.
DELLINGER: Was it from college?
GARTHWAITE: Yeah.
DELLINGER: And what school were you going to?
GARTHWAITE: The University of Chicago.
DELLINGER: Okay. And how long did you spend there?
GARTHWAITE: Well, see, I got out in February, and then I spent two quarters at the University of Minnesota, because Chicago didn’t start until September, and—let’s see, this was—
DELLINGER: Which year was this, by the way?
GARTHWAITE: I’m trying to reconstruct. So I must have started at Chicago in the fall of ’58, but I was studying German at the University of Minnesota. In that era, you had to have two foreign languages for a Ph.D. And so then it was—I was at Chicago a year and a half.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And how did you get involved in the Iranian Prehistoric Project?
GARTHWAITE: That was, again—I needed a summer job while I was studying for my prelims. So I ran errands for them. It was projected that there would be between 55 and 60 specialists with the expedition, which was originally scheduled to go back to Iraq, to Jarmo. It was a prehistoric archaeological expedition, and the leaders of it were Robert [J.] Braidwood, his wife Linda [Schreiber] Braidwood and Bruce Howe. Very, very distinguished. They were the leaders in this very important field, and they had done a lot of excavations in the Middle East.
And Braidwood was a pioneer in the use of—of science in archaeology. They were paleobotanists. There were all kinds of other, sort of non-archaeological specialists as well as archaeologists [and] anthropologists. And he had this huge grant to take this number of people back to Jarmo.
And then the revolution occurred in Iraq, and the royal family was deposed, and it was impossible, then, to go to Jarmo. And so they were looking for a similar geographic zone, where they could do prehistoric work. They were interested in the domestication of plants and animals. And so they ended up going to west-central Iran, around Kermanshah.
Conditions were extremely difficult in—in that part of Iran, and so they had to plan on all kinds of contingencies, and I sort of participated in that. And the expedition was going to start out in Mittersill in Austria and then drive in two Jeeps and two small trailers—three Jeeps and two small trailers, drive from there to Iran.
And in Europe they purchased shovels and other forms of equipment that we carried, then, in the trailers, simply because it was impossible to get those kinds of materials in Iran.
And so anyway, the plan was for Mary Chubb, who had—was a professional camp manager, particularly in Egypt—she became ill, and they needed somebody, then, to fill—fill that role, and so they asked me to go with them.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And I had a job offer from Oregon State University. I had my prelims to take, and I got out of the prelims, and I was able to cancel my contract.
DELLINGER: So—
GARTHWAITE: But I knew nothing about Iran, nothing about Iran before we left.
DELLINGER: Did you accept that—that job to go to Iran because you were interested in it or out of necessity?
GARTHWAITE: It wasn’t ne- —it certainly wasn’t necessity. Necessity would have meant that I would have stayed in the United States. But it was more out of curiosity, and sort of the excitement of doing something completely different.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And how do you feel about that decision now?
GARTHWAITE: Oh, I made the right decision, no question. I encourage my students to—to—to grab the opportunity, the unexpected opportunity when it arises; you never know where it’s going to lead. And when I went to Iran, my idea was I would come back and finish my Ph.D. in English.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And can you tell me a little about—about your time in Iran?
GARTHWAITE: Well, yeah, yeah. We spent a couple of weeks in Tehran, and then finally moved to—west to Kermanshah. And we were able to rent housing—first of all, they wanted to do some surveys before winter set in, and in the areas that were most like what they had had in Iraq. So we spent a month surveying at Shah Abad, which is another hour west of Kermanshah, not that far from the Iraqi border.
And so we lived in an oil company compound there. Then we were able to rent an empty missionary compound in Kermanshah. And the compound was surrounded by sort of ten-foot walls, and there were three fairly large houses in the compound. And we had a cook, two houseboys and a laundress that I was responsible for. And I had to do all the purchasing in terms of food, in terms of equipment, run errands—you know, dealing with the mail, helping with securing the permissions that we needed and that sort of thing.
So my—I did—I really didn’t do much archaeological work in that year, but I got to know the town of Kermanshah and the people that lived in it. Kermanshah is right on the border between Kurdistan [Province] and Lorestan [Province]. It’s a very interesting part of Iran. A very diverse population. And so I interacted a lot with—with the people there. And it’s out of that that I became interested ultimately, of course, in—in Iranian social history.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And what year was this?
GARTHWAITE: It must have been ’58–’59.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: Wait. Or, no, ‘59–’60, I guess.
DELLINGER: Okay. And how did you feel like the attitudes of Iranians were towards you and the other Americans over there?
GARTHWAITE: Oh, they were very—very friendly, very welcoming. I spent a lot of money in the bazaar every day, so I was well known. And the population was extremely supportive and receptive.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And, you see, we spent the fall gathering material at various sites, and then in the winter that was analyzed, and a decision was made where the excavations were going to begin in the spring. And then in the spring, they hired over 100 workmen to do the excavations, and the Braidwoods’ former archaeological foreman was an Egyptian, and he came from Egypt.
And then we had three major sites. One was roughly 20,000 B.C., and the others were around 8[,000] to 12,000 B.C., the other two. And so the sites were excavated. Then everything had to be shut down and packed up and shipped off.
DELLINGER: And so you attribute the Iranians’ attitude to—to your economic effect on them? How do you think they would have acted had you just been, you know, a regular American there?
GARTHWAITE: There wouldn’t have been any problems, and there was never any—any hostility. They were probably quite curious, and probably most Iranians thought we were looking for gold. That just was a common idea, that some archaeologists are digging for—for the rare objects or for gold. And the—the primary purpose of this—and the secondary purpose of this expedition was scientific. Nothing glamorous was expected. They did find one very unusual mother goddess figure, and then an Acheulean [pronounced ah-CHILL-ee-en] hand-axe, which is around 75,000 B.C., which was totally unexpected. But otherwise, the—the—it was quite unglamorous, if you know what I mean. It’s not the Indiana Jones kind of thing.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So did you feel any effects from the U.S.’s involvement in Iran previous to that?
GARTHWAITE: Well, no. See, I knew nothing about Iran before we left other than the fact that oil came from Iran and they had a shah. But I knew nothing about—I knew nothing about the history, nothing about the culture.
Kermanshah is interesting, too, because it’s a part of Iran where the Islam that was practiced was quite heterodox, and there were a number of—of—of Islamic sects in the region, which are far from being orthodox, so it was quite interesting from that perspective, too. But there was never any hostility directed at us.
And then also during the winter, the Braidwoods did some teaching at the University of Tehran, and then a group of us then did a tour of Iran, took one of the Jeeps and traveled around, looked at archaeological sites.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And historic places.
DELLINGER: So you felt no hostility from them, and you obviously found them interesting,—
GARTHWAITE: Yeah.
DELLINGER: —considering your future career choice.
GARTHWAITE: Yeah.
DELLINGER: But what were your emotional feelings towards them, towards Iran and the people there?
GARTHWAITE: Well, I actually—you know, I grew up in the Midwest, which is very green, and we arrived in Iran in the early autumn, in September, and I couldn’t get over how brown it was. And it’s also very rugged. And I think within the first three weeks, had I been given my choice, I probably would have left, because it was so alien and so unfamiliar, and it was—I suppose there was some difficulty in adjusting, too. But after those initial three weeks, I sort of fell in love with the country and with the people, and the culture. Found it absolutely fascinating.
DELLINGER: What in particular about Iran do you think really drew you to it?
GARTHWAITE: I think the countryside, and in the spring it’s dramatically green, but it doesn’t last long. But the people, themselves, are sort of very warm and engaging. And then the wonderful food. And, you see, too, at that time, Iran was probably 75 percent rural, in terms of where the population lived. It was an agricultural community, and there were lots of pastoral nomads, and so it was completely different from what I had grown up with.
And I suppose my interest in—in literature had—had a romantic side to it, and Iran was—sort of fit into that—that side of my nature.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
So it’s 1960, and you just spent a year in Iran. What—what happened when you came back to the United States?
GARTHWAITE: Well, my younger sister got married, and I had married while I was in the Air Force, and we came to—we spent the summer after—the expedition dispersed in June. We spent the summer in Europe, and—that was my first trip to Europe, and came back without any money, needed a job, and so I got a job in aerospace, because of my Air Force background. And I also got a job, because I could write a complete sentence, and so I was in the management division of Aerojet General [Corporation] in Sacramento,—
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: —California. And I was quite successful, except I had no—I had a very limited future because I didn’t have an engineering degree. Everybody else that I worked with had—I had an engineering background because of the Air Force, because of all of my training there, but I didn’t have an actual degree, and therefore I had no future.
And furthermore, the division that I was in was responsible for contracts and that sort of thing, and management. And I think there were 20 or 21 of us in that department, and two of us did all the work. Oh, it didn’t bother me, but I decided there wasn’t a future for me.
And then I had to decide to go back—whether to go back to Chicago or to change fields. And I—I—I don’t have enough of a science aptitude, really, to do sort of archaeology or the kind of archaeology that we were doing in Iran. And anyway, Gustave [E.] von Grunebaum, the great Islamic scholar at Chicago, had just left Chicago to go to UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], to set up a major center there. I mean, he was—he and a British scholar were the top two in the whole world in terms of Middle Eastern studies.
So Bob Braidwood suggested I interview with Professor von Grunebaum, so I went down to UCLA, interviewed, and he gave me money, and so I changed fields completely. I—I—I didn’t—my job didn’t allow me to study Persian while we were in Iran, and furthermore there was no place I could have studied it in Kermanshah. And so anyway, I sort of started all over again: the history, Persian, Arabic and that sort of thing at UCLA.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
So you mentioned you met your wife or married your wife while you were in the Air Force.
GARTHWAITE: That’s correct.
DELLINGER: How did you meet her?
GARTHWAITE: Singing in a choir. I didn't sing at St. Olaf [chuckles], where everybody sings, but that’s how we met. And by the time I then was given this—or these fellowships at UCLA, we had one son.
DELLINGER: And so you met her in Florida, then?
GARTHWAITE: No, in California.
DELLINGER: In California.
GARTHWAITE: Yeah.
DELLINGER: Then did she come to Florida with you?
GARTHWAITE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DELLINGER: And how did she feel about you going to Iran for a year?
GARTHWAITE: Oh, she also went, and—and—and loved it, too.
DELLINGER: So you’re at UCLA, and you’re studying history, and this is from around 1961?
GARTHWAITE: Sixty-two.
DELLINGER: Sixty-two.
GARTHWAITE: Yeah.
DELLINGER: Until?
GARTHWAITE: Sixty-five.
DELLINGER: Okay.
GARTHWAITE: And then I did my—my prelims and then went back to Iran ’65 to ’67—
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: —to do research for my thesis, for my Ph.D. thesis.
DELLINGER: So in that period, obviously, there’s—there’s a lot of important Cold War events: the Cuban Missile Crisis. What were your experiences—
GARTHWAITE: Also the civil rights movement.
DELLINGER: Of course.
GARTHWAITE: And then—and that—and that related very much to the free speech movement that started at [University of California,] Berkeley and then spread to Los Angeles, the two major UC campuses. And then I mentioned—and in addition, von Grunebaum had just arrived at UCLA, and he had brought in to do Iranian history—he brought in Nikki Keddie, who was important both in terms of her knowledge of the Middle East and Iran—and she was a major—became a major scholar in that field. But also she was very active politically, and it’s through her that I—I think that I became—but Americans generally, especially at universities in the mid-’60s were affected by a whole variety of things that had sort of come together: civil rights in particular, but also, then, Vietnam was growing as a problem.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So how did Ms. Keddie sort of affect your—your views on civil rights or—?
GARTHWAITE: Well, she was very much an activist among the faculty at UCLA, and so we talked a bit about this—oh, you—you have to remember, too, that the Middle East faculty when I was there at UCLA—again, it was about the size of the expedition to Iran. It had well over 50 Middle East specialists. Von Grunebaum could attract anybody because of his stature.
But there weren’t many students, and I think my largest class might have had four. And so every class I was in—sometimes there were only two of us. It was like a seminar. And so—oh, no, my Persian class was larger, and my Arabic class was larger. But all of the other classes were tiny. And so there was an op- —and we were quite a small group, and very, very international, very international. There weren’t many native-born Americans in the program at all. Almost everybody was from Europe or the Middle East. And so we—we—and because there was always something to discuss about the contemporary Middle East, but we also discussed what was happening in the United States.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And do you interact much with the faculty and other students outside of class?
GARTHWAITE: Yah, yah. (That’s my Minnesota, “Yah, yah” coming back.) But no, no, no, we were a very small, a very closely-knit group, and we socialized a lot together. And much less so with faculty outside the classroom. There was a bit but not an awful lot. It was—this was an era when male faculty all wore coats and ties.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And with Professor von Grunebaum, he was extremely formal. He was from Vienna and escaped the Nazis. It was a completely different era. And so von Grunebaum was—was a very formidable person, in every sense of the word, but at the same time terribly generous and kind. But we didn’t really socialize with him.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: He had us to his house at Christmas holidays maybe once a year. But he encouraged—I organized a couple of dinner parties, and when he found out—at my house, or our house—and when he found out about that, he reimbursed me by giving me books [chuckles softly], that sort of thing.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So did you individually or as a group, with other students, participate in any of the activism at UCLA?
GARTHWAITE: Yeah, we did in the free speech movement, which then morphed into—the free speech movement was related very much to civil rights, but then it began to morph into anti war.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And what did you see as the—the faculty politics at UCLA at the time?
GARTHWAITE: Well, I—I wasn’t really aware of so much of faculty politics other than Nikki Keddie—I mean, she was—you have to remember that women were not on faculties then, and so she was—she was—it was very unusual to have a young woman be given a major appointment, and von Grunebaum was responsible for that. But also she was very much a part of the left, which was another strike that was held against her, the fact that she was a woman and then she was way to the left. She—she had a lot of—of problems.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: But she did get tenure. And, again, von Grunebaum supporter her 100 percent.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So what brought you to Dartmouth?
GARTHWAITE: Well, I went to the American Historical Association annual meeting, which was in Toronto [Ontario, Canada], and this was in December of 1967, and I was finishing up my thesis then. And I was interviewed by the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth. And [Charles T.] “Charlie” Wood in the history department here was critical in terms of my interview at Toronto. And all of these three schools were interested in me because I’d worked with von Grunebaum. I mean, he was—you know, he was the [Albert] Einstein of the field.
And I had three offers from the three schools, and both Chicago and Penn was contingent on budget, and at Dartmouth it was concrete, and they only gave me 24 hours. But there’s a longer story to this. So I—by that time, I had a second son, so I had two sons—and a third on the way, actually. So the Dartmouth job was the one I took.
And then, about a month later—I can’t remember if Chicago came through first or Penn, but both of them came through and made me counter-offers, but I had already accepted Dartmouth. And when you’re a graduate student, what you want to do is you want to replicate your graduate school experience, despite the fact that I had gone to a small undergraduate college. You wanted to be in a graduate center, although neither Chicago nor Penn were of the stature of UCLA or the Middle East Studies Center at UCLA [sic; the Gustave E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA], which was world class—that and Harvard [Center for Middle Eastern Studies — Harvard University] were the two big ones in the United States. But nevertheless, they were great universities.
So anyway, I was sorely tempted, and I went to discuss it with Professor von Grunebaum, and he happened to be in Egypt, and his administrative assistant, who was a very formidable person in her own right,—and so I told her what my dilemma was, and she said, “Well, I’m going to talk to Professor von Grunebaum by telephone this afternoon, so I’ll convey your dilemma to him.” And she said, “Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you what he says.”
And I went back the next day, and she very sternly—her name was Mrs. [Helen A.] Dillon. Mrs. Dillon very sternly said, “Mr. Garthwaite”—it was always “Mr.” then; I didn’t have my Ph.D. yet—“You will go to Dartmouth. Professor von Grunebaum said you had given them your word, and so you will honor your word.” And there was no questioning, then, that I would go to Dartmouth.
And then both Chicago and Penn and the University of Texas much later came back, and Chicago had been given a lot of money by the shah, and they wanted somebody who was, you know, an Iran specialist. And they came back, but again I decided to stay.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. Do you ever regret that decision?
GARTHWAITE: No, no, not really. And, you know, I’ve lived here now for so long that I—I’ve lived longer than any other place in my life, so it’s become home.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So you mentioned your thesis. What did you write that about?
GARTHWAITE: Well, Nikki Keddie was working on late 19th-, early 20th-century Iranian history, and the—there’s a revolution in Iran, nineteen five, nineteen six [1905, 1906], and, oh, that was a hot subject then. And, you see, it relates very much to her own politics, which was—and for the left, the Russian Rev- —or the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are very important, and—and there was this revolution in Iran, and so she was studying that as it related to the other two.
And so I chose as a topic this great tribal confederation, the Bakhtiari, that played a very important role in their revolution and especially in putting down a counter-revolution in nineteen nine [1909]. And I chose that subject with the assumption that the tribal elites probably would have kept records and there would be documents that—historians are, you know, always looking for sources, and nobody had ever studied this subject before.
And so I chose the Bakhtiari then, and then went back to Iran in ’65 to ’67 to do my thesis and didn’t really find much, and I met—the number one historian of Iranian history was a British woman by the name of Ann [K. S.] Lambton, again a very formidable person—you know, every sense of the word. And I met her in Tehran—or I met her in London, actually. No, no, I met her first in Tehran. I tried to see her in London. She was at the University of London, at the School of Oriental and African Studies. And I told her that I had tried to see her in Iran, and she said that she would have discouraged me, because she was interested in this subject, too, and had never been able to find any documentation for it.
And so my thesis was—I wrote—I used limited Persian sources but relied heavily on British sources. So I came to Dartmouth, and then—a thesis is never published—theses are a peculiar animal. And so I needed to do more research, more rethinking to turn my thesis into a book. And so I got—I came to Dartmouth, was given a sabbatical and a faculty fellowship, went back to Iran for a year, and that year—then I found these documents that nobody knew existed.
And it took a long time to gain the confidence—these were in private libraries—to gain the confidence of the—the grandsons and the great-grandsons of these important leaders in the constitutional revolution in nineteen six [1906]. And so I photographed—I worked primarily with two libraries. The Bakhtiari were divided into three major families, and I worked with two of the families and never really got access to the third family, through a variety—for a variety of reasons. There were bitter rivalries between the two families but especially between the two and the third family.
And so I photographed everything in one of those two libraries, and I photographed about half of the documents held by the second family. And then that provided, really, the new basis for my book, which turned out to be, then, a very pioneering book. Tribes in the Middle East play a very important historical role, and this was the first book actually to use tribal documents to recreate that history.
And so the book, when it was published by Cambridge University Press, included my photographs and my translations of them and then my analysis. Now, my photographs were quite rudimentary, and I’d always—and I had planned, then, to go back to Iran to have them photographed professionally. But then the revolution occurred, so that when—the book actually was published, yet they had to rely on my photographs.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And in the course of the revolution, these private libraries, one in particular, was destroyed, and the others dispersed, so the only records, then, are of what I—my photographs.
DELLINGER: So you went to Iran and published this book sometimes in the ’70s?
GARTHWAITE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DELLINGER: Do you know about
when that was?
GARTHWAITE: Oh, gosh, when was—let’s see, it was just about the time of the revolution, it was finally published.
DELLINGER: So, like, late ’70s.
GARTHWAITE: Late ’70s, yeah, yeah.
DELLINGER: So you came to Dartmouth in 1968.
GARTHWAITE: Sixty-eight, right.
DELLINGER: And how do you describe the campus climate when you first arrived?
GARTHWAITE: It was all male. [Chuckles.] We had Saturday classes, but I must say attendance was pretty sparse. It was not only all male, it was virtually all white, but there were a scattering of—of students of color. There weren’t many international students. Everybody looked more or less alike. Everybody was—it was only middle class, upper middle class and upper class. It was—it was very—quite traditional.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. How do you describe it socially and politically?
GARTHWAITE: Politically, I would say it was—that’s a hard one to answer because just before I came in ’67, there were students at Dartmouth that were becoming active in terms of civil rights. The antiwar came just a bit later, but there was a concern about civil rights in particular. And what sparked that was [Alabama Governor] George [C.] Wallace [Jr.], the civil rights movement, some of the marches in the mid-’60s.
And so there were—there was a group of—of quite progressive Dartmouth students, and so—and, you see, my field, Middle East—and at Dartmouth I really didn't teach my—my specializations, although I did have—one of my early courses was on the tribes in Iran. But the students that took my courses were much more international in their outlook, and they probably weren’t typical students. And so that—and my contact with them in the classroom—at that time, faculty were much more involved socially with students. Faculty—and, you see, the faculty was mostly male, almost all—all male. And there would be faculty cocktails at fraternity houses Friday afternoon, and there was much more socializing. And, you see, we were all much—we weren’t that much older than the students, either. And so that—the students that we had contact with, I would say, were probably the most progressive ones on campus.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. But was there definitely a conservative part?
GARTHWAITE: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the faculty was extremely conservative. The English department, for example, was a bastion of conservatism. The economics department was, too. But they did have—not in English so much, but in economics there were a couple of—of radicals, and we—we—we actually began to use that term.
And I can give you an example of that. Cesar Chavez was organizing Mexican grape pickers, trying to organize them into a union in California, and—because the vineyard owners were resisting unionization, he called for a national boycott of California grapes, and so the co-op—there was a big fight—the Hanover Co-op [Food Store]—about whether or not to have grapes or not.
And the history department in particu- —the history department and the economics department shared a lounge on the third floor of Reed Hall. We were both in Reed Hall. We were on the second floor, and they were on the third floor. And we all supported—and, you see, [Louis C.] “Lou” Morton, the chair of the history department at the time, was brought in by President [John Sloan] Dickey, a very distinguished military historian. Was brought in to—to bring the history department up to national professional standards. And so he had brought in the—the group of us. Four or five of us came together. So we formed a group in the department, and he fully supported us. And we were all young and shared the same politics.
And so anyway, we went up to the lounge on the third floor of Reed Hall one day, and one of the economics professors, [Daniel] “Dan” Marx, who was against sanctions, had brought an entire crate of grapes and had put them on the—the table in the lounge. And we refused to go into the room. And as a result of that, the history department got its own lounge. [Both chuckle softly.]
But that shows the kind of division. It was partly political, partly generational, related too to the direction Dartmouth was going. And it’s no accident that John [G.] Kemeny became then the next president and continued that change at Dartmouth.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. You mentioned a few of you came at the same time—
GARTHWAITE: Yeah.
DELLINGER: —and all shared the same political views?
GARTHWAITE: Yeah.
DELLINGER: How would you describe those political views?
GARTHWAITE: We all classified ourselves as liberals. That’s the term that we—that we used at the time. There were a couple, not in our group, that were more radical than we were. We called them the radicals, and we got along fine with them. And there were two—two of them in the economics department, the two radicals. It was sort of the two radicals and the conservatives up there. I’m thinking, still, in terms of Reed on the third and second floor.
But I would say that we were—we were all Democrats, all—within the Democratic Party, left of center, quite a bit further left of center.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And we supported, you know, civil rights, supported early feminist issues. Marysa Navarro was part of this group, and she was the first woman to go through the ranks to be tenured at Dartmouth. We were all part of the antiwar group. We were all internationalists. I think that—see, and it was—Leo Spitzer was an Africanist. I did Middle East. Marysa did Latin America. And then—and [Peter G.] “Pete” Slater did American history. [Carolyn] “Rusty” Eisenberg—he wasn’t in the regular ranks, also did American. But there was a—and then Leo [C.] Lee did China. And then Jonathan Mirsky, who was teaching Chinese but was also trained as a historian, was part of our group, and it was through Jonathan, then, that the group actually began to emphasis Vietnam.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: Yeah, yeah.
DELLINGER: So did you feel any animosity from the mostly conservative faculty?
GARTHWAITE: Not in the history department. We had one very conservative member of the department, John Adams—we all called “J.C.” And we got along fine. He did not share our politics at all, but he was very respectful of us and very supportive of us. And Lou Morton, this military historian, the chair of the department, encouraged us. And his political views were very much like ours.
So within the department there was never any hostility, but there was some in the other departments. And I remember one faculty meeting. It was when John Sloan Dickey was still president, and I can’t remember why the—the purpose of the department meeting, but he came to the department meeting with his lawyer because he was that concerned about what was going to take place. Let’s see, when did he step down? Was it ’70? Or ’71? But anyway, I can’t remember what the issue [was] that was coming up before the faculty and all the young faculty—again, it was really quite generational, which was indicative of—of not just the national politics but the whole new direction that Dartmouth might be going. And [Meredith O.] “Mud” Clement in economics deliberately voted with us so that we wouldn’t—it wouldn't only be junior faculty versus senior faculty.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And there was a lot of tension in the room.
Oh, we used to have faculty meetings in 105 Dartmouth [Hall], believe it or not. And Dickey would be up there on the platform, at a table, and he was—he was respectful of us, but there was a certain degree of disdain: “Why are you bothering me with these issues? Why are you complicating my life?”—this kind of—sort of this very paternalistic attitude. And he—he was an important president for Dartmouth, too, because he’s the one that moved Dartmouth in an international direction. But nevertheless, we did complicate life for him, and he wasn’t appreciative of that. [Chuckles.]
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So you mentioned this group of young faculty that all shared the same political view. Did you guys organize in any way or meet frequently in any way?
GARTHWAITE: We met a lot. We met social- —we socialized together. We used to have dances, almost weekly dances down at the Tom Dent Cabin, and it was sort of pot luck, and—so we socialized together, and we occasionally caucused to discuss political issues, of what we could do as a group to advance these changes. And so—so there was a lot of interaction.
DELLINGER: Coming from UCLA to Dartmouth, did you plan to be involved in these political issues, or—
GARTHWAITE: No.
DELLINGER: —did it just—
GARTHWAITE: No. But I had participated in protests at UCLA, and so that in one sense, it wasn’t that different, you know, coming from UCLA to—to Dartmouth. And then meeting a like-minded group—you know, other young faculty, We all—we all came within—roughly ’68. There were a couple that came in ’67. We came in ’68; some, in ’69. And so we—we constituted sort of a cohort of shared values. And it seemed like a very natural thing.
And then, of course, in the late ’60s, that’s when everything began to heat up quite dramatically, both in terms of civil rights—you know, President [John F.] Kennedy had been killed. Robert [F.] Kennedy had been killed. Martin Luther King [Jr.] had been assa- —all three of them had [been] assassinated. And so there was heightened awareness of this. Ronald[ W.] Reagan had just been elected governor of California.
And I’ve never forgotten going to my Persian class, taught by a Persian—an Iranian, who, the day that Ronald Reagan became governor of California, said at the beginning of class that as a result of this election, the whole discourse was going to shift right. And it did.
And so you were—you know, we were all aware of, you know, national and especially international kinds of issues, so it was—it was quite an exciting time.
DELLINGER: So you mentioned differences in faculty-student interactions between now and then. How do you characterize that change?
GARTHWAITE: Well, again, this—you see, I’m of—I’m of the older generation now, and—but I don’t see the younger—my younger colleagues interacting with students the same way we did. And that might—in some ways, that might be a good thing. And I know that they interact with each other but not, again, to the same extent that we did. Dartmouth was a much smaller place then, too. You know, it’s grown in size. Faculty has grown quite significantly. The student body has grown as well.
And it’s interesting because when I first came to Dartmouth, faculty always wore coats and ties when they lectured, and in class. And in one sense, we were more formal, but in another sense, we socialized more with students. And, again, remember the faculty was male; the students were male. And then gradually there were more women joined the faculty, and then, of course, coeducation began.
And, by the way, all of us fully supported coeducation. There were some faculty who didn’t, but we all did.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. Now, why do you think less faculty-student interaction or less informal faculty-student interaction might be a good thing?
GARTHWAITE: There were some faculty members who drank too much and were—were sort of buddy-buddy with the students. There wasn’t that much difference in terms of age, but it was probably—it probably wasn’t healthy, either, for the students or some of these faculty.
DELLINGER: Okay.
Well I’d like to end there for now.
GARTHWAITE: Okay.
DELLINGER: Do you mind if we continue this at another time?
GARTHWAITE: Sure, sure. Just e-mail me.
[Recording interruption.]
DELLINGER: Hello, this is Patrick Dellinger. I’m here with Professor Emeritus Garthwaite. We’re at Rauner [Special Collections] Library in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the campus of Dartmouth College. It is August 31st, 2015, at about 3 p.m.
So the first thing I’d like you to do is sort of set the scene for us. So you came to Dartmouth in 1968.
GARTHWAITE: Right.
DELLINGER: Could you describe the campus climate—you know, what the faculty was like, what the students were like, some things that were going on at that period?
GARTHWAITE: [Chuckles.] That’s a lot. First of all, it was all male. And we had Saturday classes, although students then had a habit of not attending Saturday classes. [Chuckles softly.]
DELLINGER: Mmm.
GARTHWAITE: And it was—when I look back on it, it was quite a different place. There were lots of new faculty. John Dickey had brought in John Kemeny to rebuild the math department but also with a large aim of rebuilding the faculty, and so there were a very large number of very capable but very senior faculty, and then there was a large number of us, who sort of arrived as a cohort in the late ’60s.
And I suppose if you were to identify—what set us apart was the—I think we were all more professionally oriented, more interested in publications, this sort of thing. But it was still—[when] we came, it was still very much the old Dartmouth. There were almost no women. Marysa Navarro, who came in the fall of ’68, when I did, was the first woman actually to be brought in and attain tenure through the regular ranks. She wasn’t appointed from outside as a professor or something. She—she went up through the ranks, like the rest of us.
There was, I think—I don’t know if we talked about this last week or not, but there was I think more interaction with the faculty generally, with the students. And that has changed, of course, quite significantly. But in the late ‘60s and then in the early ’70s, as a result of Vietnam and as a result of the civil rights movement in this country, younger faculty in particular—some of the older, established ones as well—interacted very closely with students in terms of political action.
And I think all of this was very, very positive. And oftentimes students took a leadership role in antiwar activities, on civil rights events. And then, of course, the issue of coeducation came up when John Kemeny became president, and the same group of faculty and—of course, the student body changes every year, but the same group of students—and their political values—were—strongly supported coeducation.
And so—and coeducation was really a product, I think, of the civil rights movement as well as the anti-Vietnam protests. There was—change was in the air. I guess—I suppose, too, the changes that were occurring in the faculty were part of that—that process, too.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So you mentioned coeducation, but what other issues [were] really important to students?
GARTHWAITE: I think those were the—I can’t think of—oh, they wanted to get rid of Saturday classes. [Laughs.] I know that. And that also happened. And I think most of the students were quite receptive, even though who weren’t politically active, were quite receptive to these—these kinds of changes partly because the whole country was changing.
And what’s also interesting, of course, is that after the middle ’70s, Vietnam was less of an issue, international events were less of an issue, but civil rights continued to be extremely important.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And the question of—of women on campus continued to be an important issue, and the relationship of—of women to men was an important issue, certainly at the faculty level but also for—for—for some students.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So you mentioned faculty interacting closely with students in these sort of protests or political action—
GARTHWAITE: Mm-hm.
DELLINGER: Were you one of those faculty?
GARTHWAITE: Yes, yes. And I can give you a very concrete example. [Steven S.] “Steve” Rosenthal [Class of 1971], who must have been the class of ’69 or ’70—I hear from him every Christmas—is a very successful lawyer in Washington, and he drove up to Goddard College, and I went with him to participate in a teach-in up there.
Similarly, the—the shanty issue in the middle of the [Dartmouth] Green. [Kimberley A.] “Kim” Porteus [Class of 1988] was an undergraduate. She was very much a leader in the so-called shanty protest, and a number of history faculty who had her as a student participated with her in that.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So was that the extent of your sort of interaction with students on this, or did you plan anything with them, or—
GARTHWAITE: Well, there was sort of a leveling, I think, and a lot of this was sponta- —quite spontaneous.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And I remember on one occasion students wanted to have sort of a spontaneous teach-in on the Vietnam War, but yet they didn’t have the standing to hold it, for example, in Spaulding [Auditorium], and so a group of us faculty were able to arrange for that. It was very—very collaborative. And we weren’t that much older than the students, either [chuckles],—
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: —maybe 10 or 12 years older, at the most. And so there was—there was, I suppose, something of a common link there in terms of age. I think I mentioned last week, too, that the split in the faculty I think was largely generational.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And we were closer in age to the students.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So did you see yourself as—as helping the students or advising them or both, or participating in these protests with them?
GARTHWAITE: It was all of the above. [Chuckles.]
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: It was really—we found common cause.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
So starting in the winter of 1968, there was a lot of protest about ROTC on campus.
GARTHWAITE: Right.
DELLINGER: And that eventually led up to the Parkhurst takeover.
GARTHWAITE: Right, in ’69.
DELLINGER: In the spring of ’69, yes. So what—what—what are your reactions to that? How do you—why do you think that came about? What was your role in it, if any?
GARTHWAITE: Well, like other places across the country, events in Southeast Asia sort of reached a tipping point in early 1968, and this was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back, and there was this outpouring of protest. And I suppose it was a protest against government policy, but I think it was probably—this is not my historical specialty at all, and I have a vague recollection of all of this, and I haven’t thought about these things for a very long time, but I suspect that a lot of the protest was against the establishment in general. And this where the I think linkage between sort of the political status quo touching out on the international issues but then also domestic ones like civil rights and, on campus, the issue of coeducation.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And I suppose I played a minor leadership role in some instances. I was certainly a participant in the teach-ins and in the various protests. And I also spoke at the faculty—at a faculty meeting, against ROTC, and I thought that I was in a strong position to do so, given the fact that I had been in ROTC, myself.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: I remember once leafleting—that was another thing that we did—in White River Junction, of all places. And this older Vermonter came up to me and said, “Young man, what have you done for your country?” And I said, “Well, I hold the rank of captain in the Air Force Reserve.” And then it turns out he agreed with me [chuckles] on the Vietnam War situation.
But I suppose two that—I did not go into Parkhurst, but I was present when—when all of this happened, and it was very, very exciting. We were cold. It was cold, a very cold night and morning, but it was also very exciting. And the after they were arrested or taken off to the Grafton County Jail, we also visited them. And there were some faculty that—that went to jail, but it was mostly students.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So before the actual takeover happened, did you know it was going to happen? Did you—had you talked to—
GARTHWAITE: We anticipated, and we thought that the administration would call in—I guess—who—I guess John Dickey called in—called the governor, who was on the board of trustees,—
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: —and then they brought in—it was—I can’t remember—was it the National Guard [of the U.S.]? I don’t—I don’t remember that detail.
DELLINGER: I believe it was the [New Hampshire] State Police.
GARTHWAITE: The State Police. That makes more sense. And the question was when all this would happen. What was the sequence? But it was fully anticipated that this would happen.
DELLINGER: So did you speak to any of the students that were planning this beforehand? Did you advise them or—or have any communication with them?
GARTHWAITE: No, no. The takeover, itself, was I think largely student led.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And we certainly supported them, but we—we—or the group that I was with—was apparently a large group—was not part of the planning.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And I think—you see, two of the—the takeover took place, and they were given the opportunity to leave, and if they didn’t leave, then the State Police would arrest them. And, again, I think the—I really—like the gentleman out here in Rauner—I should go back and look at The [Dartmouth] D and see how The D reported this. I haven’t done—I’ve never done that.
But I think it was—I think it was largely spontaneous. There were—there were a core group of students that were clearly the leaders, but—and I—there may have been one or two faculty that were part of that leadership group.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: Again, they were all junior faculty. No, that’s not true, either, because [F.] David Roberts in our department was very senior, and he was arrested. Was that at the Parkhurst takeover? I think it was, if I recall correctly.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So do you remember the names of any of this group of faculty and this—this core group of students that were really leading the protest?
GARTHWAITE: No. Hoyt [S.] Alverson in anthropology was a very important leader, but in the end, I don’t think he was one of those arrested.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: Michael [J.] Herschensohn, who’s no longer here—he left a long time ago—in French. He was a leader. There was a young economist, whose name I can’t remember. Oh, in the math department there was a husband and wife couple, a couple, and they were—and what was her name? She was English. I can’t remember whether her husband was English or not. But she was very, very much—a very important leader. What was her name? (This is sort of gradually coming back.) [Pause.] They all came back to the faculty. A number of them did not get tenure, but they didn’t get tenure for other reasons and not for their—their political views.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And this core group of student leaders—did you have many interactions with them?
GARTHWAITE: No, because none of them—the ones—I suppose the ones that I had in class are the ones that I interacted with the most, and they were sort of the next level down. But there were maybe half a dozen, a dozen in the core group.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And you mentioned you went to see the students who were arrested in jail. Like, what was their mood like? How did—how did they react to being arrested?
GARTHWAITE: Well, first of all, they were happy to see us, and none of them were particularly downcast. I think they saw themselves as acting heroically, trying to stop this greater injustice.
There was a lot of humor involved with this, although I must say, when the State Police arrived, there was—it was very—I remember very clearly that the whole mood changed. There’s one of anticipation, and then their arrival, and they removed them physically from Parkhurst. The mood changed, shifted very dramatically. And then it was after they were bused off that it was sort of very anticlimactic.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And then the question was, what kind of punishment would be meted out for them?
DELLINGER: So did these students feel like they had accomplished something?
GARTHWAITE: At the time, yes. But, of course, the war went on, and on and on.
DELLINGER: And do you think they accomplished something?
GARTHWAITE: I think—yes, I think—at the time, they didn’t, but the awareness of it after finally led to the end of the conflict. But it was the—the whole issue was, at a national level, was very, very divisive. There were some divisions on campus, but I think it was less divisive here than it was nationally. And I think there was—there was considerable community support for the antiwar movement on campus. It wasn’t just Dartmouth students and faculty; it was the larger community.
DELLINGER: Now, you mentioned how the college would deal with these students afterwards. How did that process go?
GARTHWAITE: Well, then there was—well, the equivalent to—what is it—what do you call it now, the COS [Committee on Standards]?
DELLINGER: We call it Parkhursting now.
GARTHWAITE: Oh. Anyway, there was a committee that in a sense tried the students, and I remember that Charles Wood, a very distinguished medieval historian, a distinguished medieval legal historian, defended—oh, his family name was [Payne? 1:33:30]. I was going to say Thomas Payne, but that’s not right. But each of the students had—actually, that’s one student that was arrested that I knew very well. But, yeah, each of the students then had a faculty representative in—in that process.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And so that was followed very closely.
DELLINGER: Did the faculty have any role in deciding their punishment or—or in the lead-up to the Parkhurst [takeover]—besides defending individual students?
GARTHWAITE: No, I think—because the—the procedure followed established college guidelines, and so it was to make sure that the students got a fair hearing and that the guidelines were adhered to. I think that was—that was the concern, so that this would be sort of a kangaroo court.
DELLINGER: So going back to before the Parkhurst takeover, the faculty decided to sort of reaffirm its strength and their policy on protests and the like. Do you think that had any role in sort of instigating the Parkhurst takeover?
GARTHWAITE: No, no. I think it was much more—the origins of the Parkhurst takeover were much more national. And there were some students that I know in that leadership group that had participated in SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]—what was the student group that met in Michigan, a radical student group that met in Michigan? Some of them had been at that—had been affiliated with that group. And they were the ones that brought I think the most radical ideas to campus, but the—the groundwork for supporting them was much broader than that, than that SDS.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So what was your role after the Parkhurst takeover? Were you involved with these students anymore after that?
GARTHWAITE: Well, after that—and this is, I suppose, too,—I certainly supported the students—there was later protesting over Cambodia and the Kent State [University] killing. And the same group of faculty, those that were here, continued to support—and there was very, very broad faculty support for the later protests, very broad.
And in fact, there was one member of the administration, even—also occasionally taught a history course, Waldo Chamberlin, who was in Parkhurst when the students took over. And he refused to leave. We had a faculty meeting about ending the term early, and—so those students could join in a national protest and they could do so without penalty. I don’t think—I think finals were canceled. And Waldo Chamberlin, who was in Parkhurst at the time the students took over and refused to leave when the students demanded that he do so, nevertheless in the Cambodia period, protest period, supported the student protesters.
DELLINGER: So you mentioned the faculty supported the later protests but not necessarily the protest about ROTC.
GARTHWAITE: That was—yeah, that was—the ROTC issue was in some ways charged, because a lot of the faculty had been in the military, but also it was a way of providing financial support for the students. And there’s also the sense, I think, from many that the military needed young men (because it was still young men then) with leadership qualities and with liberal arts educations.
But my boss, when I was in the Air Force, was [General] Curtis [E.] LeMay, and he I think was the only four-star general that came up through ROTC, and he was—it’s a name you probably don’t recognize. He was head of the Strategic Air Command, and he was a very hard-liner. And he was hardly an example of somebody who came up through ROTC.
But it was thought very widely that ROTC was sort of a leavening agent for militarism. And that’s why, in some ways,—I was going to—it’s not more complicated than the other issues, but nevertheless it was—it was one area where there was sort of a crossing over of people that were protesting Vietnam and then Cambodia, the Cambodia bombings. But then, at the same time, there was a recognition that we needed a military, and the more officers with a broader educational background, the better it would be for the country.
DELLINGER: So do you think it was a specific issue that caused the difference in support between these different protests.
GARTHWAITE: That—you mean ROTC? Or what was—
DELLINGER: The specific issues, so the difference between the ROTC protest support and the Cambodia protest support.
GARTHWAITE: Well, the Cambodia protest support was much broader, much, much broader. And—I mean, the whole student body, practically, supported that, whereas that wasn’t the case with—earlier, in ’69.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: But I think the student deaths at Kent State, the bombings in Cambodia—I earlier used the metaphor of the straw breaking the camel’s back. This really was a step taken too far. So I think there was much, much broader support for protests.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: Was it in the top of the Hop [a venue at the Hopkins Center for the Arts]? A lot of the students—and it was still, you know, largely male—had long hair, and they set up barber shops and had their hair cut as a sign of protest, interestingly. And there were lots of student study groups. There were many, many more of those all over Cambodia than there were in ’69.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
So after the Parkhurst takeover, there were several more protests. Do you remember what any of those were?
GARTHWAITE: No, but there were a lot.
DELLINGER: You can’t remember.
GARTHWAITE: Yeah, there were a very large number. And then, you see,—and then after Cambodia, this morphed into civil rights on campus, and—although—you know, again, the student body changes every year, and so there—there wasn’t necessarily student continuity except in the sense that the new students were politically active and the group—the group of protesters simply grew, and there was much broader—there was very broad support, again, for civil rights in the middle and late ‘70s.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And I guess into the early ‘80s, because—what was the date of the shanty? I’m terrible with dates, even in my own field. But I don’t remember, actually, when that took place.
DELLINGER: So what was your role in later protests?
GARTHWAITE: Pretty much—I was quite consistent. I supported the various student groups. I participated in teach-ins. And the teach-ins for the civil rights was very, very important. The civil rights took also—brought some issues to campus in terms of more minority faculty, more courses dealing with, you know, history, sociology, the politics of civil rights. So I—I was a participant. I was a protester.
DELLINGER: Now, you’ve mentioned these teach-ins a lot. Can you walk me through how exactly a teach-in would work?
GARTHWAITE: Well, here, the teach-ins required some organization. You had to—really basic organization. You needed a venue, a place to do it. Then you needed to invite faculty to speak on various aspects of the teach-in, whatever the subject was. And then you needed to publicize this. And then you needed to convince the faculty to suspend classes for a day or part of a day so that students could participate. So there was— basic organization was necessary.
And I think with the teach-ins, faculty probably played a key role, along with some students. A lot of the activism associated with both civil rights and the antiwar protests were student led. Teach-ins—there was coordination and cooperation between students and faculty. But the teach-ins were more, I think, a faculty idea.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. Now, you had your core group of—of more liberal faculty.
GARTHWAITE: Mm-hm.
DELLINGER: Did you feel treated differently by those outside that group?
GARTHWAITE: Yes. And in some ways, we didn’t care. But at the same time, we knew that we had gone a step further, that they disapproved of—but at the same time, the college procedures in terms of promotion and tenure I think were basically followed, and I think that process—I don’t think we were worried about that process, because certainly in the history department, there were maybe five or six of us. We had the full support of our chairman and the explicit support of the fac- —most of the faculty and implicit support of a few that were less than hearty about what we were doing.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So you don’t believe your career was affected.
GARTHWAITE: No, no.
DELLINGER: How did it affect other parts of your life?
GARTHWAITE: Well, you know, I mentioned when we talked last that I was probably most influenced by Nikki Keddie at UCLA, and this related very much to the free speech movement at the University of California system. And that certainly affected how I looked at Vietnam. Teach-ins were very important in terms of this free speech movement. And the teach-ins from the free speech movement—Mario Savio at Berkeley, for example—the teach-ins sprang out of that movement, and then they spread across the country. And so they affected my views then and my participation both in the antiwar movement as well as in the civil rights.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. So looking back, are you happy with how you participated in and handled these protests?
GARTHWAITE: More or less, yeah, although looking back, I think we were terribly naïve, and I’m not sure, given the administration in Washington,—we certainly put pressure on them to change, but they also resisted that for as long as possible. And then we had the terrible years of [Richard M.] Nixon and [Henry A.] Kissinger.
But also looking back, one realizes how important President [Lyndon B.] Johnson was in terms of domestic affairs and certainly in terms of civil rights—how prophetic he was, as a matter of fact, despite his own background. But what a poor leader he was in terms of—a flawed leader in terms of—of Vietnam.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: And, you know, in looking back, one would wish that that war had been brought to its conclusion much earlier. I mean, tens of thousands of Southeast Asians, you know, suffered as a consequence or were killed, and too many Americans.
And also I suppose one regret is how the burden—that we placed the burden of guilt on the young men who were fighting when in fact they were fighting, but they were also doing it under orders, which in some ways is not an excuse, but the greater burden should have been passed on the leadership. And ultimately it was.
This is a stark contrast to American attitudes towards those who serve in the military, for example, in [the] 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the sympathy that’s poured out for them and the suffering that they underwent. But this is—the same kind of support should have been shown to—especially ordinary soldiers—
DELLINGER: Mm-hm.
GARTHWAITE: —in—in Vietnam.
DELLINGER: Why do you think they didn’t get that support?
GARTHWAITE: Because I think there was a kind of lumping together of the antiwar effort and those that were fighting it. No distinction was made as to culpability. But if you’ve read [Dartmouth] President [James] Wright’s book [Those Who Have Borne the Battle: A History of America’s Wars and Those Who Fought Them] on how Americans have treated their military since the Civil War, not that much have changed. We now pay lip service to providing support to those who fought in Iraq and, belatedly, those who still suffer from the costs of—of—Vietnam. We pay lip service to it, but we don’t actually provide much beyond that for them.
DELLINGER: Now, you’ve seen a lot change at Dartmouth over the years, but do you think this crucial time of protest has changed the way the administration and the faculty deal with students?
GARTHWAITE: I think—yeah, yes. I think that—the administration had become more legalistic on the one hand in dealing with students. I think they’ve also put more responsibility on students, and it’s far less paternalistic than what it was 40 years ago, although I haven’t paid much attention in the last 20 years to how students are disciplined.
One thing: The protesting students, certainly with the Parkhurst takeover and then also in some of the civil rights cases that came up—the students took full respon- —those that were the leaders and were brought before the disciplinary committees took full responsibility for what they did. It was sort of a badge of honor. And in that sense, they felt that—when they went into whatever it was—the action they took, that they would be paying the consequences.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And do you think Dartmouth is heading in the right direction in light of the reactions to this—to this protest?
GARTHWAITE: Gosh, I suppose it’s an inevitable evolution from that experience and that the various committees—it’s the Committee on Standards, isn’t it, COS? it used to have another acronym, and I can’t remember what it was. But I think there’s been—there has been some evolution. But I also thing, it—it’s become—has become more legalistic, too.
Some students actually had outside legal advice in the aftermath of the Parkhurst takeover, and I think that’s much more common today.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. How did the students that didn’t have that outside legal advice get any sort of legal advice?
GARTHWAITE: This is where the faculty stepped in. Although they weren’t trained as lawyers, some of them had very strong legal skills and knowledge, and so that the faculty acted as advocates for them.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. Now, if there were similar sort of protests on campus today, do you think it would turn—turn out in a similar fashion?
GARTHWAITE: Well, you see, it’s—I can’t imagine what the protests would be about today. I mean, the student body is much more passive than it was. This was a decade or a decade and a half of intense political activity across the nation at almost all universities and colleges. And I don’t know what—what would take—the same thing to sort of reoccur today.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. Now, do you think Dartmouth was unique in that period?
GARTHWAITE: No, not at all. It was quite typical. And, again, I mentioned going with Steve Rosenthal to Goddard, but there was an attempt on the part of students at Dartmouth to reach out to smaller schools and schools without the same kind of resources, to provide support for them, so in that sense, Dartmouth played I think a regional role. But they also—the same group then would participate with student protesters in the other Ivies [Ivy League schools] in particular. But they went beyond that, to some of the regional colleges, too.
DELLINGER: And do you think this whole period and the events within it had a positive impact on Dartmouth?
GARTHWAITE: Oh, yes, very much, very much so. And, you see, all kinds of changes were—some of the changes were in train when all of this broke out. Then John Kemeny became president, the coeducation, year-round operation. Dartmouth was—was completely transformed by the early 1980s. Complete transformed.
DELLINGER: And do you think it’s in a good place now?
GARTHWAITE: Yes, mm-hm. Can you imagine Dartmouth without women?
DELLINGER: I cannot.
GARTHWAITE: [Chuckles.] And if you look at the faculty, minorities are way underrepresented, people of color, but in many departments, the number of women reflect the number of women with, you know, Ph.D.s in those fields. It’s closer there, so there’s a good—it could be stronger, but there’s a good record there.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. Do you have any last thoughts that you’d like to share?
GARTHWAITE: Yes. About 10 years ago, John [A.] Rassias and I were invited by a group of students that we had shared to come and speak to them at a reunion, a small reunion that they were having, and they asked us, “What’s the biggest change that you’ve seen at Dartmouth since you’ve been here?” And John has been here longer than I have. And do you know what it was? A sense of entitlement on the part of students. But also on a lot of faculty. And that’s something that—
When—when women first came to Dartmouth, the women came from—very much from the same kind of social backgrounds that the men did. They had many of the same interests. There was this whole issue of class, which Americans are very reluctant to discuss. That didn’t change much. It began to change when more and more minority students came and more and more international students came. And then that began to change attitudes towards issues such as gender and the other really important issues in American society.
And then there’s—there’s a shift—I think Dartmouth reflects very much changes in American culture, and—and this is where the entitlement, I think, the sense of entitlement comes in.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. And do you see that as a problem with a solution?
GARTHWAITE: No. [Laughs.] I think that’s a harder knot to untie. I mean, sure, you know, a lot of students are—are very generous in the times that they—in the time they commit to helping others, this sort of thing, for example. But at the same time, there’s this very, very strong sense of, Well, we’re entitled to this.
And Dartmouth—you know, when you look at the place, Dartmouth has all of the facilities, the faculty. It has everything that one would expect at a major university. And yet it’s essentially still for undergraduates. And this is what puts Dartmouth in sort of a unique position. Sure, it’s not Harvard or Yale [University], but it’s not Williams [College] or Amherst [College], either. And who was it? Was it George Bernard Shaw that said, “Childhood was too precious to be given to children”?
In a sense, you know, Dartmouth students don’t appreciate what Dartmouth has until they—until they leave. And what an unusual and, for many, a missed opportunity this has been!
DELLINGER: Do you think Dartmouth is unique in a sense of entitlement?
GARTHWAITE: No, no, no. Not at all. I think it just reflects, again, the changes in our national culture.
DELLINGER: Mm-hm. Any last thoughts?
GARTHWAITE: That’s it. [Laughs.]
DELLINGER: Thank you very much.
GARTHWAITE: You’re welcome.
[End of interview.]