Interview with H. Bruce Franklin

Franklin, H. Bruce (Howard Bruce), 1934- ; McKiernan, Stephen

H. Bruce Franklin is an American cultural historian and scholar. He has received top awards in American Studies, science fiction, prison literature, and marine ecology. Franklin has written and edited nineteen books, three hundred professional articles, and has participated in several film productions. He was awarded the Pearson-Bode Prize for lifetime achievement in American Studies. Franklin currently is the Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He received his Bachelor's degree from Amherst College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University.

2010-03-10

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

46:50

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Bruce Franklin
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 10 March 2010
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)

SM:
[inaudible] again, thanks a lot for agreeing to participate in my book project. The first question I want to ask you is I want to go into detail on what happened to you at Stanford. But what I do not know about you is your parents, your background. Who were your role models and inspirations before you went into the military? Because the material that I read is after that. So how did you become who you are?

BF:
Well, I grew up in Brooklyn. You know that much, right?

SM:
Yep.

BF:
And my father had six months of high school [inaudible]. And we lived in a working class neighborhood. Well, I was born, actually, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and then my parents [inaudible]... We were also talking about Engels. And as far as the work that I do, I would say that Engels' writing is probably more influential, directly influential, on my thinking than Marx's writings, especially Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. I think those are very powerful and important analyses today. Lenin, I think [inaudible] radical opus of communications. But I kind of see Lenin's writings as falling into two categories. One, his analysis of imperialism, which I think is still very, very helpful and insightful. And so, his [inaudible] Marx with 19th century capitalism, the key text was Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he describes the political economy which was dominant in the world during the first couple decades of the 20th century and on through the period of [inaudible] the mid-1970s. But in that period, colonialism as a system was destroyed. And this is what makes the Vietnam revolution so important in 20th and 21st century history, because it was cutting-edge. [inaudible] 1945 and 1949, a quarter of the world's population gained national independence from colonialism. In (19)49, in the Communist revolution, another quarter of the world's population was breaking away from [inaudible] decades of the 20th century. The world that we have (19)75 to 2010 is a different form of imperialism from what Lenin was writing about, although he saw finance capital becoming primary in the system. So that pretty far-sighted to think. The other part of Lenin's writings really revolve around the question of how to do it, or as he put it, what is to be done? And I think that the relevance of that writing in the post-Soviet period has got a whole string of question marks after it. It is not a simple question. I do not think these labels are very helpful anymore. I think that my books and articles speak for themselves. I have developed my own theoretical constructs, which are there in the book. My main work is as a cultural historian. So although if you look at ... If you look at Warstar's... Although I do feel [inaudible] with the relationship between what Marx called base and superstructure of [inaudible] the industry, what Eisenhower had called the-

SM:
[inaudible]

BF:
...military-industrial complex [inaudible] a Marxist. To deal with that [inaudible] the main things I am focusing on really are consciousness issues [inaudible] cultural superstructure. And I do not think you will find much in Marx's or Engel's or Lenin's [inaudible] cultural superstructure. If anything, if there was one figure that was most influential on my approach to this, originally was Christopher Caudwell, C-A-U-D-W [inaudible], who himself was a Marxist and who died defending the Spanish popular government [inaudible]. I think Horowitz is such a fool. He and these other people who are whining about not [inaudible] themselves [inaudible] members of the faculty [inaudible]. The fact is that their work cannot withstand critical scrutiny. [inaudible] It is not well-researched. It is not [inaudible] by any standards. It is just foaming-at-the-mouth propaganda.

SM:
One of the first questions that I ask on the general area of questioning is the critics of the (19)60s generation blame a lot of the issues in the world today, the problems we have in this country, back to the boomers, the people that were either protesting the war, the 15 percent of the activists, who just could be about as many as 20, 25 million, and the breakdown of the family, the divorce rate, the drug culture, the sexual revolution, the beginning of the -isms, the pointing fingers toward other people for people's problems... And your thought on that kind of... And then secondly, because you have talked about the fact that small numbers of people can really make a difference in this world... And obviously, one of the critics of the (19)60s generation, or the boomers and the activists, is that only 15 percent were ever involved in any part of activism. So they use it as a negative as opposed to a positive, whereas 85 percent were just living their lives normally. I believe subconsciously everyone was affected. I do not care who you were. But how do you respond to people who generalize, again, that this period... And of course, this was when the Democratic Party was falling apart, too. And even Barney Frank wrote a book speaking frankly, where he states that the Democratic Party needs to separate itself from the war people, the anti-war, McGovern people, if it wants to survive as a party. So just your thoughts... And that was in (19)72 and-

BF:
The Democratic Party did separate itself from McGovern. That is what happened.

SM:
[inaudible]-

BF:
Because the people [inaudible] Democratic Party decided they would rather lose the election than lose their party. So they pulled the rug out from under him. The main thing is, who was right, who was wrong, the anti-war movement, or the people who got us into that war and kept us into that war and have kept us into war ever since? The people against the war were right. And in fact, it would be nice if the consciousness had not been largely erased, thus allowing this situation that we are presently in.
Here is the way I look at it, putting my life in [inaudible] context. And it must have been [inaudible] 15 or 16 in 1945. I was riding around in Brooklyn. I was 11 years old, riding around in Brooklyn in the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of other kids. And we are all screaming, "Peace, peace. The war is over." The sidewalks are thronged with people, and everybody is yelling, "Peace, peace." And we really believed that we were going to spend the rest of our lives in a world without war, because the fascists and Nazis had been defeated, the militarists had been defeated. Democracies [inaudible]. And the fact of the matter is that I have spent almost the entire rest of my life in a nation that has been almost continually in a state of war. And in fact, while we were celebrating that, the Truman administration was making a deal with France to transport an invasion army to Vietnam, and arm that invasion army, an invasion army consisting of the largest [inaudible] Nazi soldiers.

SM:
Amazing. I read that. Yeah.

BF:
Not that we knew what was going on, which is why, I think, people are cynical, people believe you cannot trust the government. People believe the government lies to us and manipulates us, because the government's run in the interests of a few. It is pretty obvious.

SM:
Are you disappointed? You mentioned nine years old when you were at Stanford ... or I mean, excuse me, when you were in college. The boomers were a lot younger. But I know it is very difficult to generalize about 78 million people, but they have become the leaders. They have become the head of corporations. They run the world now, really, and all of the Generation X-ers who had followed them, their sons and daughters. How do you feel about this generally, this boomer generation? How do you feel about the 15 percent who were activists? And as they got older, did they remain activists? How many lived their ideals?

BF:
A lot did. There is a whole website [inaudible]. Stanford had [inaudible] the Stanford [inaudible]. And it had a website and archives [inaudible]. And I have [inaudible] because most of the people seemed to me to lead engaged lives, very active in their communities. So the idea that everybody who was active just gave up... corporations [inaudible]... I mean, I guess this is where my analysis and your analysis maybe part ways pretty dramatically, is I do not think of the generation as a very useful category-

SM:
I have heard that from other people. Yeah.

BF:
...because [inaudible] a big chunk of time ... I have three kids who are boomers. And they were born in (19)56, (19)58 and (19)63. So I do not think of them ... My wife and I were talking about this relationship [inaudible]. We have never thought of our children as boomers.

SM:
Do they think of themselves as boomers?

BF:
I do not think so. No, I do not think so. It is true. My wife is the same age that I am. We were Depression babies [inaudible] babies [inaudible]. But I think social class, gender, ethnicity have a whole lot more to do with people's behavior. I suppose that as far as I know, the only thing you can really document about when you have a huge demographic bulge like that is that when that bulge reaches age 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, you are very likely to get an increased rate of crime. Historically [inaudible]-

SM:
Teenagers, yeah.

BF:
...because most of what we define as crime, as opposed to corporate crime, most of what we define as crime is committed by people of that age. So when you have got more people of that age, you are probably going to have more crime. And obviously [inaudible], but-

SM:
Well-

BF:
...[inaudible] and then there is all this medical research and everything that is come out, that people [inaudible] 16, 17, 18, 19, there is a core part of their brain that is not fully developed, which has something to do with their judgment. I mean, I look back at myself as a teenager, and what I know about other [inaudible] and I say, "How does anybody ever live through their teens?" They do not have a lot of sense. And a lot of people think they are immortal or bulletproof, or something. We knew some of the stuff that our kids were involved in. We have found out more [inaudible].

SM:
Did you have a generation gap with your kids, when you were... because they always say that boomers, they really had a generation gap with their parents [inaudible].

BF:
No. I mean, [inaudible] share our values. We are very close [inaudible].

SM:
Right. In your view, when did the (19)60s begin, and when did it end?

BF:
I would say the (19)60s began in 1964 and ended around (19)74.

SM:
What was important in (19)64, Johnson winning, or...

BF:
Well, the way I see it, the I Have a Dream speech marked the end of it, the big March on Washington [inaudible], that, and the assassination of Kennedy. And then (19)64 was the first of the long, hot summers. It was the Mississippi Freedom Summer. It was the Gulf of Tonkin. It was the [inaudible] full-scale [inaudible]. And then, of course, [inaudible] was assassinated [inaudible]. I think if you looked at King's (19)63 speech and the April (19)67 speech and you put them together, you will see, how could so much change take place in such a short period of time?

SM:
You are talking about the Vietnam speech?

BF:
Yeah, yeah. And by (19)67, he is saying, "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government. We are fighting on the wrong side of the war [inaudible]." This is the same guy that gave the I Have a Dream speech? He was part of the culture, and the changed situation and consciousness [inaudible]. So by (19)67, obviously, we were really into it. Early (19)65, the first anti-war demonstrations, the teach-ins of early (19)65.

SM:
And it ended in, you say, (19)74. Was that because the Vietnam War was over, or...

BF:
Well, (19)74, (19)75, someplace in there. The creation of the prison industrial complex. In some ways, you might be able to take... if you were going a couple years later. By (19)78, it was clear [inaudible]. I mean, [inaudible] emancipation radically changed between (19)77 and (19)78. (19)73, the United States surrenders in Vietnam. (19)75, the war is over. The change in dance styles began [inaudible]-

SM:
We had disco, yeah. Yeah.

BF:
It really takes over in the (19)80s.

SM:
You talked about ... because you are a cultural expert, and I had a chance to talk with Dr. Morris Dickstein, who talked about his book. And he wanted to talk more about culture. And what was it... the boomers often felt that they were the most unique generation in history. When they were young, they were going to change the world, create almost a utopia, end the war, bring peace, end racism, sexism, you name it. And then there was this feeling that they were unique, more unique than any other generally. Your thoughts on that kind of an attitude? Because many of them still feel that at 62 or 63, as they have gotten older. But what I am leaning into is, after you answer the question on uniqueness, what was it about the culture that stood out so different ... I know the music was unbelievable, the art was unbelievable, the theatrical performances. I am fascinated by guerrilla theater, that I do not think ever existed before. All these things that were a very important part of the period, and the movies, and the TV shows and documentaries, and the personalities on TV, there is a lot here. First, the question on uniqueness.

BF:
Every generation is unique, because every generation... See, I do not even know how... I have to confess something. The way my mind works, categories in general tend to break down. Whenever I started looking at categories, the boundaries of the categories start to come through. So I have a problem even with the concept of a generation.

SM:
That is okay. So did Todd Gitlin.

BF:
Yeah. [inaudible] So I can understand gender. That category I [inaudible]. And I can conceptualize class. But when there is a generation, it really seems to be very... the boundaries are so fluid. Okay, after World War II is [inaudible]. But what difference does that make? There were all kinds of other things happening in the world that were affecting people of different generations. And when I think of the anti-war movement, concrete... a lot of the people who were most active were people in the (19)60s, (19)67, (19)68, (19)69, who were in their 50s, 60s, 70s and older. And I do not know by percentage. Now, if you look at colleges, it is true that there were spectacular events at colleges, because it is easier for college students to engage in spectacular activities than it is for people who are working in the factory.

SM:
You are saying we tend to dwell too much on the college-educated as opposed to those that did not go to college.

BF:
[inaudible] Well, people, maybe they went to college, but I am saying different ages, different classes. This is not to belittle the college movement. It is wonderful, and I will be honest, [inaudible]. But I think the images that we have are quite inaccurate. When I think of the particular participants who were there year in and year out, a lot of them were older people in the community. But that is not the image.

SM:
How important were the... I am going to get to the culture question. How important were the college students and college student protests in ending the war?

BF:
Well, if you listen to the Vietnamese, they were very important.

SM:
Right. David Horowitz.

BF:
(19)64 to (19)68 was a period of [inaudible], which probably had a more direct role. But these things are not unrelated to each other, because the people who were rebelling in the cities, a lot of them were people who were going into the military [inaudible] because [inaudible] I think that in the final analysis, it was people in the military whose anti-war activities had great effect in ending the war; other than the Vietnamese, of course [inaudible]-

SM:
And you are talking-

BF:
The Vietnamese were going to win. They were going to win, no matter what.

SM:
Can you talk about that? And I know it is a very sensitive issue. I have brought it up with Vietnam vets who went there, and they may not want to talk about this part of the... I remember Country Joe was on our campus many years back, with Jan Scruggs. And we were eating dinner. And Country Joe is a little older than Jan Scruggs. And then out of nowhere, during the middle of the dinner, he says, "Have you ever wondered why there were no POWs for the North Vietnamese? Because they were all killed," he said. [inaudible] they were all killed. And Jan C., he did not want to talk about it. That is an image that happens a lot, that they just handed them over to the South Vietnamese, and they did whatever they wanted to do with them. And there was truth there, but-

BF:
Yeah [inaudible] MIA [inaudible] I debated on [inaudible] of the POW/MIA [inaudible] Vietnamese [inaudible]. If you had a choice between being captured by their side and captured by our side, which would you pick? And he was honest enough to move away from this whole area of discussion.

SM:
Oh, wow. He just very... Spitting Image is a book that comes out. And I have read it [inaudible] read it. Your thoughts on ... you mentioned just some commentary here, it is in the book. But why were the Vietnam veterans or people who fought in Vietnam the reason why the war ended? What did they do besides... I know they ended up writing and the other...

BF:
Yeah. I mean, it is there. It is documented in Vietnam [inaudible]-

SM:
Yeah, and we got the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, when they came back.

BF:
Well, Robert Heinl, writing in Armed Forces Journal, has quite a formative essay called The Collapse of the Armed Forces. And that is pretty accurate, because they were collapsing. And this is why Nixon ultimately had to withdraw the ground troops. The only units that were really capable of coherent playing at the level were [inaudible]. The conscript [inaudible] worse than useless, from a military point of view. They did not want to be there. They were largely [inaudible]. They wanted to come home alive. And you could write off, if you wanted to, the motivation of a lot of the people in the army in Vietnam who were actively against the war [inaudible] confusing [inaudible]. However, after [inaudible] and Nixon decided to switch the strategy to depend upon naval air power, we then had a revolutionary newspaper being published on every aircraft carrier [inaudible]. I cite in the book 1,500 members of the U.S.S. Constellation signed a petition to have Jane Fonda's FTA show brought onboard the carrier. Insurrections on ships, sabotage on ships, to the point that by October 1972, five aircraft carriers and their attending fleets had to be brought back to San Diego because they were unfit for combat, because of the anti-war activity in the fleet. And you cannot write off those guys as just trying to save their skins, because they were not in any danger. So why would they physically have taken action against the war? During the Christmas bombing, there were B-52 crews who refused to fly. Intelligence officials who were doing things like leaking the Pentagon Papers. So the students who were protesting on campus had limited means to really apply leverage. [inaudible] but the anti-war people in the Army, Navy and Air Force had a lot of leverage.

SM:
Is not it true that what was happening in Vietnam was happening in America, and that is the division between Black and white... there were those who said when they got into battle, that may have been a different story. They would fight to the end. But times when they were not in battle, the tensions of racism were still there, the drug culture. Everything that was happening in America was happening in the service, and that was part of the reason why it was going downhill.

BF:
But on the other hand, a lot of what was perceived was just the fact [inaudible] was not. A striking example was when a major ship... It was an aircraft carrier [inaudible] San Francisco. And a large number of crewmen refused to go aboard ship to go back to Vietnam. And there is a picture [inaudible]. They had their fists raised, like this. And the captain said, "[inaudible] crew members raised their fist in the Black Power symbol." But then you look at the picture, and a lot of the guys were white. So it was not a Black Power symbol. It was something else.

SM:
We got just a couple more minutes here. One of the basic questions I have tried to ask everyone... Well, there is two questions here. One is, and you may not want to answer this, because you do not believe in the generation concept, but if you were to define the generation, would you call them the Vietnam generation, the (19)60s generation, the Woodstock generation, the protest generation? [inaudible]-

BF:
It does not compute in my brain.

SM:
You said this era was so important culturally, and different than any other. In just a few words, how would you define the uniqueness of the culture during the era of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movements and the evolution of all these movements in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s?

BF:
Well, if you wanted to think of it in one particular word that pulls a lot of things together, I think it is the word liberation. And it is a word that was widely used then: women's liberation movement, Black liberation movement, People's Liberation Army. So going in many different areas, there was a sense of liberation from something. Obviously, you can see it in the music. Rock was perceived as liberating, whatever. I think a lot of people thought that some drugs were liberating. But then you have to be careful when you are talking about this, because even then, and certainly today, what is America's number one drug problem? It is not marijuana and it is not heroin and it is not cocaine. It was the same number one drug problem that led to... the 18th Amendment? [inaudible] prohibition.

SM:
[inaudible]-

BF:
So alcohol. If we want to talk about the destruction of families, domestic violence, violence on the highways, shattered lives, lost careers... But a certain amount of people have looked at marijuana at some point. Other people looking at LSD. I do not think they were looking at meth as [inaudible]. Anyway, so-

SM:
Were the movies and the TV shows liberating, or how about the media culture, all those?

BF:
Well, yeah, I mean, whether they were or were not, there is the perception, I think, of that. [inaudible] in a lot of different ways. It was not just people who were involved in the anti-war movement [inaudible] that time, people were being liberated from something about the conformist and oppressive culture that dominated in the (19)50s.

SM:
Of course, TV was another part of this generation. They saw everything, and they saw the war on TV. One of the questions that our students came up with when we went down to Washington... I think it was like the year before you came to our campus. Senator Muskie was still alive. [inaudible]... This is what they asked him. I have got this right here, or is it here? They wrote it here. We usually have a hard time finding this. Oh, okay. The students wrote this: "Do you feel boomers are still having problems with healing, due to the extreme divisions that tore the nation apart in their youth, the divisions between Black and white, gay and straight, male and female, division between those who supported authority and those who criticized it, divisions between those who supported the troops and those who did not? What role did the Vietnam War play in healing the divisions, or was this primarily a healing for veterans? Do you feel the boomer generation will go to its grave like the Civil War generation, not truly healing? And are we wrong in thinking this way, or has 35, 40 years made the following statement true: time heals all wounds?" Your thoughts on whether we are a nation that cannot heal from all those divisions from that time, that maybe what we see today in our society is a lack of tolerance [inaudible] for other points of view, people do not want to work together. Do you see anything there? And a lot of these boomers are now going into senior citizen status. And I know we may not like to call them a generation, but the Civil War generation, a lot of them... because I have studied Gettysburg, and many of them never healed from that battle.

BF:
Well, again, I do not see this as being confined to a generation, because I think the chasms did open up in American society during this period in 1968 [inaudible] exposed [inaudible] most divisive events [inaudible]. I do not know if we can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Certainly, today when we talk about red states and blue states, I mean, this is a pretty new concept, except that if you look at the red states, to a large extent, you are looking at lines that pretty much parallel the Civil War.

SM:
In fact, Muskie's response was, "We have not healed since the Civil War." And he would not even talk about anything else.

BF:
Yeah, but we have had a lot of elections since then which were landslides for one party or another party [inaudible] sections of the country voted the same way. You do not see that happening right now, although I think in 2008, it looked like maybe we were going to get out of this mess. Virginia, North Carolina voted for Obama. But since the Republican Party, I think accurately, decided that they had to destroy Obama in order to survive and flourish as a party, and then they kept developing a strategy based on that assumption, that those chasms have become much greater. I do not know if you have gone to any of the town hall meetings?

SM:
Yeah, with Senator Specter.

BF:
I do not know [inaudible].

SM:
It was not fun. It was like they talked down to him, just like he was nobody.

BF:
[inaudible]-

SM:
Whether you like him or not, you do not treat a politician... Boy, it was unbelievable.

BF:
Yeah. Well, my wife went to one in Montclair, which is a very liberal town. And she said it was really scary, really scary.

SM:
So as Senator Gaylord Nelson said, people do not walk around with lack of healing on their sleeve, but he said it forever affected the body politic. And that is the way he responded. It has not healed within the body politic itself.

BF:
But I think the main thing that is going on now is more and more [inaudible]. I do not know what forces there are right now that are going to reverse that [inaudible].

SM:
What are your thoughts on the Vietnam Memorial when you see it? Has it done the job of healing the nation in any way beyond the veteran community? What are your thoughts on that? What do you think of it?

BF:
Well, what I like about the Vietnam Memorial is that it does not glorify war. We have too many statues of people with swords on horseback. I guess it affects different people in different ways, but it is certainly not something which encourages militarism. On the other hand, what was... McNamara's estimate of the number of Vietnamese killed, 325,000 [inaudible] 250,000-

SM:
[inaudible]-

(End of Interview)

2010-03-10

Stephen McKiernan

H. Bruce (Howard Bruce) Franklin, 1934-

46:50

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Historians; Authors, American--20th century College teachers; Rutgers University; Franklin, H. Bruce (Howard Bruce), 1934--Interviews

Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.