Arnold Kaufman, Bergman’s colleague in the philosophy department, was searching for a way out of the pickle.
Though still in his 30s, Kaufman had a long resume on the left. He’d
been active in the Congress on Racial Equality in the 1940s. He had
worked with the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society. As a
political philosopher, he was trying to craft a middle path between the
revolutionary left and traditional Democratic Party liberalism. (His
arguments would be published in an influential book, The Radical Liberal, in 1968.)
At 8:30 a.m. on March 17, with seven days to go before the “work
moratorium,” Kaufman called Jack Rothman. How about a meeting of the
moderates — tonight? Rothman agreed. They split up a list and called
Bergmann, Marshall Sahlins and Eric Wolf from Anthropology, and Roger
Lind from the School of Social Work. Eight in all met at Kaufman’s
spacious contemporary home.
Rothman remembered it as “a strained and tortuous affair. Everyone
wanted to avoid the strike, viewing it as a muddy, uncertain tactic,
with a low level of support and a high level of active disapproval. But
how to get out and what to substitute was unclear. We had all pledged
ourselves to the strike; we could not pull out now and leave our
colleagues to bear the brunt of an action to which we had given
approval. We kept searching for a forthright alternative, one which
would not be seen as retreat or capitulation by those who had promoted
the strike.”
Hour after hour they talked, tempers flaring. Finally four of them –
Kaufman, Bergman, Sahlins and Wolf – retreated for a smaller parlay.
Then an idea “occurred” in Marshall Sahlins’s mind — “if that’s even
the right word for a process that was more social than it was
individual, and more instinctive than it was creative,” as he put it
later.
Sahlins had grown up in a family of Russian Jewish immigrants in the
Chicago suburb of Oak Park. His quick wit was sharpened at the dinner
table every night; Sahlins’s brother Bernard later founded the Second
City comedy troupe that would spawn “Saturday Night Live.” Arriving in
Ann Arbor as an undergraduate in the late 1940s, Marshall Sahlins
brought an endless stream of jokes and puns and a determination to
become an anthropologist. He got his Ph.D. at Columbia, did fieldwork in
Fiji, then joined the Michigan faculty. Radical in his politics, he was
already developing what would become deeply influential ideas about how
culture shapes social and political change.
All the organizers had been inspired by the campaign of “sit-ins” by
young African Americans to protest the injustice of racial segregation.
Now, according to Sahlins and others who were there, he said something
like this: “I’ve got it. They say we’re neglecting our responsibilities
as teachers. Let’s show them how responsible we feel. Instead of
teaching out, we’ll teach in — all night.”
It was very late. But Arnold Rothman called Bill Gamson right then to
ask for another meeting the next night, moderates and militants, to
talk about Sahlins’s idea.