Saturday, January 07, 2006
Sam Alito, the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, and the Class of 1957's 25th reunion
Democrats hope to tie Alito to Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP).
Alito will testify that he joined CAP as a protest over Princeton policy that would not allow the ROTC on campus.
THE DRUDGE REPORT has obtained a Summer 1982 article from CAP’s PROSPECT magazine titled “Smearing The Class Of 1957” that key Senate Democrats believe could thwart his nomination!
In the article written by then PROSPECT editor Frederick Foote, Foote writes: “The facts show that, for whatever reasons, whites today are more intelligent than blacks.”
Senate Democrats expect excerpts like this written by other Princeton graduates will be enough to torpedo the Alito nomination.
One Democrat Hill staffer involved in their strategy declared, “Put a fork in Scalito. It doesn’t matter that Alito didn’t write it, it doesn’t matter that Alito wasn’t that active in the group, Foote wrote it in CAP’s magazine and we are going to make Alito own it.”
Well. If this is the standard, then any of these clowns who have agreed with, voted in support of, or broken bread with Ku Klux Klan "Exalted Cyclops" Robert Byrd need to consider whether they, too, are fit to sit in judgment of Alito. Indeed, if one is suddenly unfit for the Supreme Court for having joined an organization that happens to have within its ranks an unreconstructed racist (and I am in no way, shape or form suggesting that Frederick Foote is one), then, presumably, any Democrat who joined the party while George Wallace remained a prominant member should be disqualified. By that standard, Ruth Bader Ginsberg is unfit to sit on the Supreme Court.
But that obvious point -- which will be made by every righty blogger in the world by lunch tomorrow -- is not the purpose of this post. I know the answer to at least one of the questions begged by Drudge's story: Why did Frederick Foote feel the need to mention race in an article defending Princeton's Class of 1957 from a "smearing"? The answer: The Class of '57 was an early and unwitting target of the culture wars that would so consume American campuses in the 1990s.
I do not have a copy of the Foote article in hand. I do, however, remember when it was published and, more importantly, why it was published. I am working from memories that are almost 24 years old, so cut me some slack if I get a detail or two wrong when the full story comes out, but I am aware of the basic facts because I was a junior at Princeton in 1982, and as the son of a member of the Class of 1957 I spent time at their 25th reunion. My father died more than seven years ago, but I remember the controversy that dogged that reunion. It was absurd.
In early 1982, when Princeton's Class of 1957 was gearing up for its 25th reunion, some enterprising mystery pollster surveyed the Class and its counterparts at Harvard and Yale. I do not know who cooked up the survey because the article (by Eberhard Faber IV) in Princeton '57's 25th reunion book, which I do have, uses the passive voice:
Like the auk, the emu and the gnu before us, we of the Princeton Class of 1957 are headed for extinction, being actuarially about halfway there from the very hot day in June when we graduated. With a view towards making things easier for some future biologist who may wish to know what this beast that is us was really like, lengthy questionnaires have been sent to all of us (as well as to those in the class of 1957 at Harvard and Yale), and a great many auks, emus and ghus have responded.
Unfortunately, we can't tell from this record who organized the survey and wrote the questions. In a class that includes, among others, Robert Caro and W. Hodding Carter, one might have expected less of the passive voice (and more biological accuracy) in the introduction to the reunion "yearbook." We can know, however, that the survey was entirely unscientific. That's important, because the results of the survey triggered a storm of controversy.
The survey asked factual questions and called for opinions on a wide variety of subjects, and included a short section at the end specific to each university. The Princeton version had 147 questions. Neither the reunion yearbook nor Faber's article give any indication of the actual number of responses received back from the Class of 1957, so there is no way to measure the validity of the statistics based on the information I have.
It is actually very interesting to see what the classes of 1957 at the nation's top universities believed in 1982. This was a group that included -- in addition to Caro and Carter -- Tom Kean (the governor of New Jersey at the time and later the chairman of the 911 Commission, among other accomplishments), financier Carl Ichan, and Harrison Goldin (the once-famous and well-regarded controller of New York during its fiscal crisis in the 1970s), and countless partners in top law firms, investment bankers, captains of industry and academics. Among other attitudes, 31% thought that "pornography is harmless," 32% that "anybody can grow up to be President," 49% that "you can never trust the Russians," 43% that "we should negotiate a new SALT treaty with the Russians" (hmm... perhaps this is where Ronald Reagan's famous "trust but verify" formulation came from), 71% (and 81% at Yale) that Jimmy Carter was "well-meaning but incompetent," and a surprisingly high 43% (59% at Yale and 64% at Harvard) that "homosexuals ought to have equal rights."
The bombshell was in question 105, which asked the Class to "agree," "disagree" or declare uncertainty with the statement "Blacks and whites have equal intelligence on the average." Thirty-six percent (36%) of the Princeton respondants (and we do not know how many there were) agreed, but 31% disagreed and 19% said they were "not sure."
Boom.
The undergraduate activists of 1982 considered these responses to damn the Class of 1957. A firestorm of protest erupted. People demonstrated, others denounced the Class in print, and the returning alumni spent a good part of their 25th reunion defending themselves -- often in front of their wives and families -- instead of having a good time (true, the situation was not helped by the non-stop blaring of Sister Sledge's "We are Family" from a loudspeaker, which surely had to have been calculated to drive off the pickets). Candidly, I spent a good part of the weekend torturing my father's classmates. Nobody could find anyone in the class who would own up to the response -- OK, I found one guy from Missouri -- and there was no evidence that people who bothered to return the survey matched up perfectly with the people who showed up for the reunion.
So where does Frederick Foote and the Concerned Alumni of Princeton fit in? The CAP had been founded ten years before to rally the alumni to oppose coeducation -- which was a done deal by 1972 -- and other changes on the campus. As I recall, the CAP campaigned against almost any change at the university, but fought particularly to preserve what it perceived to be its character, circa the Eisenhower administration. Early on, it had a great deal of support, but its membership melted away when people realized that
Without having the benefit of reading it again, I'm all but certain that Frederick Foote's article that is today the noose with which the Democrats hope to hang Sam Alito was nothing more than an old alum's lame railing against changes that he saw in Princeton. "Old" alum? Frederick Foote was in the Class of 1940 (scroll down), so he was born in 1918. Here's what his class wrote on his death:
On Dec. 20, 2001, we lost one of our most popular, loyal class leaders: President 1946-50, Class Agent for AG, Schools and Scholarship Committee member.
Fritz prepared at Hotchkiss. At Princeton he majored in English; played baseball (in 1939 he appeared in what reportedly was “the first-ever televised sporting event”); was news editor of the Princetonian, on the Nassau Herald board, the Student-Faculty Association, and president of Cap and Gown.
He had a lifelong interest in sports and all things nautical. Fritz toured the Pacific theater with the US Navy from 1942-45 as a lieutenant senior grade. Later he was a tugboat captain in New York Harbor. In recent years he joined three close friends for an Atlantic crossing on a 46-ft. ketch.
Fritz’s postwar career with US Steel included executive positions in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, where he was active in many civic affairs. He and his beloved wife, Sally, retired to their home by the sea in Castine, Maine, where their pattern of public service and giving continued.
In addition to Sally, his wife of 51 years, he is survived by four children, Katherine, Elizabeth, Virginia, and David, five grandchildren, and two stepgrandchildren. To them we extend our sincere condolences.
Do the Democrats really want to smear Sam Alito so badly that they will drag Frederick Foote's name, honor and family through the mud on account of one errant sentence written in a moment of justified outrage? If so, may I suggest that it is not too late to reopen the books on Robert Byrd, and all those who consort with him.
6 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Jan 07, 12:12:00 PM:
Smearing Fritz will not cause a moments loss of sleep for Dems...just as undermining the war on terror and helping kill US soldiers does not bother them in the slightest.
As long as they can make a few political points, they are giddy.
By , at
Sat Jan 07, 04:51:00 PM:
Indeed, it is really sad. And dangerous, not just for our brave soldiers overseas but for the political process here. As recent events have shown, the Republicans need a viable opposition or they just sink into the morass of corruption on Capitol Hill.
By 
Meme chose, at
Sun Jan 08, 11:50:00 PM:
The Democrats are burying their electoral prospects one smear at a time.
By , at
Mon Jan 09, 08:47:00 AM:
First I had thought of CAP in 24 years. Funny, I remember little about the CAP and Class of '57 controversy. (It was my father's class, too.) Being '82, perhaps I was just in my own little celebratory world.
I remember meeting one of CAP's leaders (perhaps even their president) during my freshman year. Nice enough guy, but way out-of-touch.
We jsut tought of them as relics.
TIGOBLUE
By St Wendeler, at
Mon Jan 09, 05:48:00 PM:
The more they try to fight this nomination, the less time that they'll be able to spend attacking the GOP on a variety of issues. Given the ridiculousness of this attack, I can't imagine that the Dems are this stupid politically.
However, they've proven me wrong in the past.
;-)
Regards,
St Wendeler
Another Rovian Conspiracy
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