Fathers and Sons

THE CONFLICT OF GENERATIONS: THE CHARACTER AND SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDENT MOVEMENTS by Lewis S. Feuer. 543 pages. Basic Books. $12.50.

It was Henry Thoreau's grandfather, Asa Dunbar, who set the pattern for American student rebellions over 200 years ago. As the Mario Savio of 1766, he was protesting against the poor quality of Harvard College chow. His slogan: "Behold our Butter stinketh!"

When Dunbar was condemned by the faculty for "the sin of insubordination," the rebels, writes Lewis Feuer, conducted "not a sit-in, but an eat-out; they breakfasted in town."

Would better butter have solved the problem? Don't count on it, warns Feuer, now professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, formerly professor of philosophy at the University of California during what he calls "the Berkeley Student Uprising" of 1964.

Feuer does not explore young Asa's home life. But it is his general thesis that the Dunbars and Savios of this world are not really concerned with butter or student-faculty ratios or even free speech. They are simply acting out their hostility toward Father. Student movements, as Feuer sees them, are history's proof of the Oedipus complex.

Like a sort of campus crime reporter, Feuer hustles from century to century and country to country--Germany, Russia, Japan among others--gathering evidence to support his group-neurosis theory. The theory is, at best, debatable. And like most men with a pet theory, Feuer seems compelled to hand in evidence in his own favor. But his book makes fascinating reading as a partial compilation of the games a great many young people play. With allowances for Feuer's bias, the basic game of Getting Back at Father goes like this:

Ploy No. 1: "I can't respect you any more." The opening gambit for all student movements, says Feuer, is "the moral de-authorization of the older generation." Like a replay of Death of a Salesman, a million sons must unmask the hypocrisy of a million fathers. Feuer writes of three generations of 19th century Russian students: "Each generation refused to be morally castrated as its fathers had been."

Ploy No. 2: "I only want to help." Positing a moral vacuum, students step in as chosen redeemers--"the Elect of History." Since they have a sense of mission rather than any specific purpose, they attach themselves to a "carrier" movement: civil rights, labor, etc. "Back to the people" causes are most popular with middle-class students, particularly if they permit an extra nose tweak for Father. (Mao Tse-tung has recalled the pleasure it gave him to side with the peasants that his father exploited.)

Ploy No. 3: "I always knew you didn't like me." Student movements are anxious that the Establishment (i.e., Father) behave badly. Indispensable to the morale of student movements is an "episode of repression." Nothing develops better "generational solidarity" among the students than official rejection, particularly when there is violence.

Ploy No. 4: "You made me do it." Feuer sees terrorism as the natural climax to student movements, since after all what Freud's "primal sons" want to do to Father is symbolically kill him. In Feuer's version of history, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which precipitated World War I, reads like this: the young Bosnian student Gavrilo Princip "finally achieved his place as a father-destroyer . . . even though it also meant the destruction of himself and the maiming of European civilization."

Ploy No. 5: "I don't care what happens to me." Feuer believes that student movements have a morbid need for what the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini called "the touchstone of a martyr." The suicide rate in student movements has been conspicuously high. In Japan, at a peak of student unrest, suicide (the "ultimate test of one's sincerity," the ultimate thwarting revenge on Father) became the No. 1 cause of death among those under 30.

Feuer finally judges student movements to be both destructive and self-destructive. "Parricide, regicide, and suicide"--so goes his sequence. He heaps blame on students for a lot more than just World War I. You name the issue; Feuer makes a tie-in. Fascism: Student Leader Karl Pollen and his dagger-wearing elitists "set back for a generation the liberal aspirations of the German people . . . The heritage of the German student movement of 1817 was transmitted to the Nazis." Communism: Russian students "stood back perturbed and bewildered," says Feuer, when the Bolshevik Revolution finally occurred.

But student terrorism, he assumes, had conditioned Russia to "pathological politics," corrupting an "already corrupt and sick Russian society." Black ghetto riots: Berkeley was "the intellectual precursor for Watts." From time to time, Feuer guardedly acknowledges the id alism of the young. But his essential position is that "student movements are a sign of sickness, a malady in society."

Feuer goes much too far, and that is a pity, for he has what his subject badly needs: scholarship. But he supplies too much of what it distinctly doesn't need: partisanship. As an angry father figure stuck with an angry-son explanation of history, he becomes in the end a victim of those excesses he describes. What makes Feuer's book ap pealing, especially to that group which may be loosely referred to as "grownup," is its easy (too easy) explanation of current woes and rages that many Americans find painful and inexplicable. What makes it potentially baneful is that, by putting all the vociferous, outrageous young in one conveniently labeled specimen bottle, Feuer encourages his read ers in the smug, seductive notion that all their criticisms of today's world should be dismissed.

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