by Jeffrey Stanley
H. Bruce Franklin was born in 1934 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and raised in Flatlands and Flatbush. “Flatlands was a very working class neighborhood. We may have been the only Jewish family there,” he recalled. “Flatbush was a neighborhood in transition. There were a lot of refugees coming from Europe; it was rapidly changing.”
Bruce entered BFS in the eighth grade in 1946. He had transferred to the school from PS 99. “I was getting suspended. I was actually in a fair amount of trouble,” he admitted. “I don’t know how my parents found out about BFS but I’m glad they did. It was a turning point in my life.”
For the first time he felt he was in a school that truly nurtured him and encouraged him to use his mind. He also developed good relationships with other students for the first time. So much so, he says, that when he attended Amherst College he was let down. “At BFS there was a real intellectual interchange and encouragement. I’m sure professors at Amherst intended that to be true, but there was a whole different ethos—it was a fraternity school.” Still he made it through, and then moved to California to attend Stanford University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in English and American Literature. He then took a teaching position at Stanford, and that’s when all hell broke loose.
By now the United States had boots on the ground in Vietnam and had been there for several years. “Stanford University was a key player in the war, and has been in the present war as well,” said Bruce. “Condoleeza Rice was a provost there.” In 1971 a group of students took over the university’s Computation Center with Professor Franklin’s encouragement after they discovered that there was a top-secret program running on the university’s computer system for orchestrating an air strike on Laos. His actions were covered in Time magazine and other publications.
In the grand scheme of the anti-war movement, the students’ temporary shutdown of Stanford’s computer lab was a tempest in a teapot. Still it branded Bruce a radical and prompted the university to try to dismiss him despite the fact that he had already been granted tenure. “Stanford was trying to get rid of me, and they used this as a pretext,” he said. “They stated that ‘rehabilitation is not a useful concept because Professor Franklin’s perception of reality is too deeply held.’” He proudly added, ”I’m glad to hear that’s true.”
Bruce and his wife Jane were also targeted by CoIntelPro, a covert Nixon-era program charged with surveilling and disrupting the activities of anti-war civilians. Today, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, Bruce has seen the nearly 6,000 pages of CoIntelPro documents pertaining to his activities. “They decided that I needed to be ‘neutralized,” he explained. “In one document they said they now felt confident imitating my writing style. They wrote letters and signed my name to them and sent them to newspapers around the country trying to make me seem like a lunatic. It’s a quite a record.”
Why are so few college students today reacting against Iraq with the same ferocity as the 60s generation against Vietnam? “I think one of the big differences is that students were a whole lot more naive then,” insisted the outspoken professor. He defended his position: “Today there’s a much wider understanding of what this war is about than what Vietnam was about. People in the ’60s genuinely thought they could change the government’s mind, that the government wasn’t aware of what it was doing.”
Iraq is a different story. “With this one, the people who started the war laid out their reasons in advance via the Project for the New American Century [a neoconservative organization run by colleagues of President Bush]. People are aware that the President was systematically lying, that the invasion of Iraq had been planned before 9/11.” In short, today’s generation isn’t naive enough to think a demonstration or sit-in is going to change the president’s mind. “Instead you need to change the government. You need a regime change.”
After his elimination from Stanford, Bruce was turned down by hundreds of universities. “I had three kids, I was blacklisted, I couldn’t get employment as a teacher.” He was finally hired to teach at Rutgers University, where he happily remains today. “The state of New Jersey now pays me to teach what I was fired for saying at Stanford. It turned out to be a great thing for me, I love teaching here. It’s an amazing place.” He is the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies, teaching tantalizing courses with names like Vietnam and America, Science Fiction Technology and Society, and Crime and Punishment in American Literature.
Bruce also is the author of 19 scholarly books to date. “Over the years I’ve tended to open up new areas that warrant investigation,” he said of his oeuvre. He considers War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination to be his most important work. “That came out in 1988. I’m working now on a new edition of that,” he said. “A lot of things have happened since the collapse of the Soviet Union, obviously.” The book traces the history of our nation’s desire to create the ultimate offensive weapon, a device so frightening it would presumably end war and create a lasting, worldwide peace. “Instead what we’ve done is create weapons capable of destroying not just civilization but the human species,” he said. “We need to understand what kind of thinking got us into this mess and keeps us sinking deeper into it.”
Bruce’s attitude today is in sharp contrast to the position he held while a student at BFS. His ideas were more in keeping with those of his most memorable BFS teacher, Mr. Harold Vaughan, who taught English. “He was actually quite conservative politically but his classroom was a wonderful forum. We had these huge political fracases in his classroom that he obviously enjoyed and we enjoyed.” At that time, the Cold War was raging and the U.S. was fighting in Korea. Bruce credits Mr. Vaughan’s course with introducing him to new ways of thinking. “The most radical ideas that I heard were in that classroom and coming from a classmate who was really making a lot of us think about our anti-Communist assumptions,” he said. “It was really an unrestrained discussion that opened up new lines of thought for me.”
The openness of Quaker meeting was also an influence. “Meeting for Worship showed a way of approaching cosmic questions different from some prescribed path.” Still, he stressed that this did not magically turn him into a leftie. “It didn’t translate into liberal or progressive politics. I didn’t change my political position until much later.”
Bruce credits Miss Mary Pomeroy with influencing him to pursue writing as a career. “I was editor of the literary magazine and we really thought it was some kind of avant-garde magazine. Of course it wasn’t, but we thought it was. Some of the intellectual pretentiousness we had is a little bit embarrassing now, but we were kids.”
After he graduated Amherst, Bruce returned to New York and worked for six months on tugboats before entering the Air Force. While a tugboat worker he met his future wife, June. “She grew up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina. She was working at the U.N., and we met in a very chance way. We only knew each other for several weeks before we decided we were going to get married.”
They have been educating each other ever since. “I think we have continued to learn a lot about America from each other because our backgrounds are so different.” They raised three children and now they have six grandchildren, all living in northern California. Bruce and Jane live in Montclair, New Jersey.
The Board of Trustees and Head of School Michael Nill are pleased to announce that Dr. H. Bruce Franklin ’51 will be the Commencement Speaker and recipient of the George Fox Award at Commencement Excercises for the Graduating Class of 2007 on June 13, 2007.