Palo Alto, page 38
When Stanford turned itself over to Frederick Terman for a transformation, he remade it into the archetypal Cold War university. That meant a reversal of the school’s fortunes, driven in large part by a flood of defense and defense-affiliated spending. He shaped Stanford to attract outside funds, and in the decades that followed state priorities drove the evolution of Palo Alto as a whole. That meant weapons research at the industrial park and missile building at Lockheed, as I’ve said. But Terman pushed other parts of the school to replicate the successes in engineering. In 1955, Stanford ceded 87.5 acres to the federal government so it could build a veterans’ hospital on campus.40 We could interpret this as a charitable gesture of a university in a country that spent most of the preceding decade at war, but it’s also in line with the Terman strategy to maximize opportunities for outside support. The VA was spending twice as much per patient as state hospitals were, and patients were an experimental resource, as were students.41 The Cold War required novel techniques, and the development of novel techniques required test subjects. Without the administration’s approval, and sometimes apparently without the knowledge of the researchers themselves, the CIA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting Stanford faculty working on MK-Ultra subprojects in the 1950s and early 1960s.xv
The doctor who oversaw Kesey’s first dose was named Leo Hollister, and he played an important role in Palo Alto history. Trained at the VA in San Francisco under the auspices of the navy and then recalled during the Korean War, Hollister decided that, if the United States was going to have so many wars, he’d be better off making a career in the VA than in private practice. He became an internist at the Menlo Park VA hospital and had a breakthrough in the early 1950s using a hypertension drug to treat schizophrenia. By 1959, when he attended a CIA-funded conference on LSD, Hollister was medical director at Menlo Park and a leader in psychopharmacology. When presenters suggested that LSD ingestion mimicked the schizophrenic state, Hollister was skeptical. The CIA was happy to pay him to check it out.42 That’s how Kesey ended up trying every drug in the government’s medicine cabinet, from LSD to psilocybin to mescaline to morning glory seeds. Kesey was free to consent and consent and consent—as a Stanford student with an outside shot at the 1960 Olympics, he was a solid specimen by any bodily standard. Not all Hollister’s patients were in the same boat. After Stanford opened its campus VA site, Hollister moved there, where he managed research. This is how he later described the (then brand-new) hospital: “Barbaric, by today’s standards; we had patients in the Palo Alto VA who had been [in the VA system] for fifty years, since World War I, never left the hospital, stayed there until they died. We had about a thousand patients and most of them were very, very quiet.”43 Like criminals with long sentences and prisoners of war, catatonic patients were good subjects for sketchy experiments. Whom could they tell?
MK-Ultra gets a lot of buzz in large part because of how outlandish and methodologically suspect the work was, but it wasn’t so different from a lot of the other federally financed research going on at Stanford at the same time. The destroyed evidence makes it difficult to see where the rogue CIA program ended and regular university business began; Leo Hollister’s experiments, for example, do not seem to have been grouped under the program, though they were funded by the agency and are often discussed as part of MK-Ultra. It’s hard to say what exactly was the CIA, anyway. During this period the agency worked through dozens of front and pass-through organizations with innocuous names such as the Knickerbocker Foundation, the Michigan Fund, and the Munich Institute.44 Stanford kept its fingers in everyone’s pies as a landlord; the CIA was a customer. The agency sent a team to check out Xerox PARC—the CIA being a valued Xerox client—and after Engelbart and English visited CIA headquarters at Langley, a man with no name came (with a contract) to SRI to be briefed on the augmentation center’s work.45
And then there was Al Hubbard, the LSD pioneer behind the LSD pioneers. A conservative Catholic, Hubbard was an alcohol runner turned prohibition agent, a weapons smuggler for the CIA’s predecessor OSS during the early days of World War II. Hubbard was a drug “researcher” with lax distribution standards and a bankroll that made him Sandoz Pharmaceuticals’ best acid customer, flying around on his own plane with a black bag full of premium quality LSD. He was, as one history of the era puts it, “not a CIA operative per se.”xvi Instead he operated in a gray area between industry, organized crime, and the security state—no wonder he ended up in Palo Alto. Hubbard lurked behind Stolaroff’s International Foundation for Advanced Studies, and when that shut down, Willis Harman hired him for “security” at SRI’s Alternative Futures Project. He ran LSD trips and gathered opposition data about the student New Left, a job description about as bizarre as Hubbard’s uniform: khakis, gold badge, pistol, and a belt strung with bullets.46
And yet Stanford’s most disastrous government experiment didn’t even involve the CIA. The money for social psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s infamous six-day research project in the summer of 1971 came from Stanford’s dear old friends at the Office of Naval Research.47 After the Holocaust, the field of social psychology rose to consider and explore questions of discipline, conformity, and obedience—the most famous being Stanley Milgram’s electroshock trials in which participants were supposed to have believed themselves to be shocking another volunteer on the orders of the experimenter. These experiments tended toward the theatrical, with experimenters assuming the role of the (implicitly Nazi) state. Zimbardo’s study was about the dynamics between prisoners and guards, so he recruited some young men from the Palo Alto community and built a small jail in the basement of Jordan Hall. He flipped coins to assign participants as prisoners or guards, while Zimbardo was the superintendent. To maintain realism, he had the Palo Alto police pick up the “prisoners” at their homes, handcuff them, and bring them to the basement jail, where guards looked after them. Much of the experiment was captured on video, and you can watch the interviews with the young men, who all seem like chill dudes in that California ’70s way, though less so after they were arrested without warning on a Sunday morning.48
At the jail, the abuse began immediately. It did not occur to the guards that their job involved anything but tormenting the prisoners, and they quickly invented psychological punishments: numbers for names, forced push-ups, food control, sleep disruption, withheld bedding, interminable repeat-after-me drills, mock rape. The prisoners started breaking down on Monday. When one of them demanded to be let out, Zimbardo refused to leave his superintendent role, suggesting that the young man could become his informant instead. On “visitor’s day,” when a prisoner’s parents complained that their son looked to be in bad shape already, on day two, Zimbardo consciously appealed to the father’s masculine pride: “Don’t you think that your son can take it?”49 Guards forced prisoners to write happy form letters to their visitors, and it was only Wednesday.50 When Zimbardo brought his girlfriend, Stanford psychology grad student Christina Maslach, to the jail, she saw what was going on and prevailed on him to shut it down on Friday morning, eight days before the planned end.
In his recollections of the experiment, Zimbardo leans toward infernal metaphors. His bestselling book about the experience didn’t come out until 2007, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal and the subsequent trial, in which Zimbardo testified as an expert for the defense. He called the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil; for some the walk into Jordan Hall was a “descent into Hell”;51 he considers what happened in that Stanford jail to have been an experiment in the “psychology of evil.” But for a guy who “accidentally” summoned Satan into his office basement and did the Dark Lord’s bidding for a week, Zimbardo is not particularly apologetic. He takes clear pride in how influential his little play has become, and he was certainly rewarded, including with Lewis Terman’s old chairmanship of the American Psychological Association. If you think of this situational evil as a kind of demonic possession, it makes sense not to feel too bad about being a host, but Zimbardo created the situation, or at least part of it. The Stanford Prison Experiment is supposed to be a lesson about a species (humans) rather than a place, but generalizing from the behavior of young men in Palo Alto is unscientific. Part of the play’s drama comes from the contrast: Look at these nice college boys and how quickly they turn to monsters! But the experiment was in Jordan Hall. From the perspective of the state, college boys were an essential national resource; they were already doing war work. So was Zimbardo.xvii The situation was broader than Zimbardo understood it to be, even in retrospect, with decades of distance. Turned into jailers, led by a Stanford scientist, those young men behaved exactly as California’s white settlers usually have: with a useful excess of sadism.
A professor in a hastily constructed basement jail taking notes while he pays out of the defense budget for one group of college students to torture another was a natural result of the Terman postwar plan for Stanford. So was a campus hospital full of 1,000 very, very quiet veterans swallowing whatever they were given. So was the personal computer. And all of it was war work in the global struggle against communism.
Footnotes
i As you’ll read, the hatred was even stronger among non-patriotic citizens.
ii Celebrated books like What the Dormouse Said and From Counterculture to Cyberculture have drawn different versions of this Venn diagram, but Stanford and the Palo Alto community are always smack in the middle.
iii The poet Steve Abbott recalls a night in North Beach in 1975: “The club seemed full of basket cases and I wasn’t surprised when a thin ragged Black man wandered in, took a swig from a bottle, and jumped up on stage spouting some haunting words that were barely audible to most of the audience. The MC, an attractive blond wearing a medieval pageboy costume, then took the microphone. ‘That was Bob Kaufman, founder and greatest poet of the Beats.’” Steve Abbott, Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat Books, 2019), 200. Asked about poets of the Beat community, artist Joe Overstreet recalled, “The poets were Bob Kaufman. I didn’t believe anybody else could ever be a poet but Bob Kaufman.” Oral history interview with Joe Overstreet, March 17–18, 2010, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
iv The FBI believed the CP instigated the founding of the HTUC to counter the influence of A. Philip Randolph’s anticommunist Negro American Labor Council. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “A. Philip Randolph, File No. 100-56616,” n.d., 78.
v Pryor spent most of 1971 in Berkeley and around the East Bay’s black political-artistic-intellectual scene. See Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, 2014).
vi “I came out of a society in San Francisco and in California of where I was with the Merchant Marines and they had taken our union—you know, and they had—we were mess boys and cooks anyway. So they had taken that and taken it from us and put us in jail and called us communists.” Oral history interview with Joe Overstreet, March 17–18, 2010, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
vii Allen Ginsberg was a red diaper baby and describes the American overthrow of the Mossaddegh (Iran) and Arbenz (Guatemala) governments in the early ’50s as important for his consciousness, but he characterized himself as “neutral” in the Cold War, against Eastern Bloc authoritarianism and homophobia. In Ginsberg’s diary he recounts a dream I read as particularly meaningful: “Emerging up from 3rd class to First on great oceanliner—up the staircase to the deck—First thing I meet, huge faded negro Paul Robeson—in officer’s uniform—I salute him introducing myself which doesn’t mean much to him—he bows—I begin scheming immediately—Being a big officer Communist negro all these years perhaps he could get me a book in the NMU so I can ship out? I see he’s working on an open deck hole with a lift truck & wire lift placing faded 2nd hand turkish rugs in the hold—Old communist, I notice I am amazed at his calm—he is folding the dead in to carry that way (Won’t they not smell up the exported carpets?)—I see one corpse in the hold lying face up on rug, he’s getting a layer of carpet to cover that. The corpse is a middle-aged man dead-faced & slightly rotten lying on a rug drest in a blue business suit. I wonder if I have the guts to face corpses like that negro communist.” Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties (Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007), 177–78.
viii The Maryland NMU chief recounts going into waterfront bars with an interracial group of sailors, and if the owner objected that the business was segregated, he would throw a beer glass through the bar’s mirror: “There, you’ve just been integrated.” Gerald Horne, Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (NYU Press, 2009), 141.
ix Jane’s maid Bertha Berner allegedly accused Wing, who after her death worked to preserve the Stanford family’s memory at the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum until it was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. This failed scapegoating attempt by Berner strikes me as one of the strongest pieces of circumstantial evidence against her.
x The Internet Movie Database and the Library of Congress both have the short’s title recorded as the plural Deviled Hams, which though it is perhaps more clever and descriptive is nonetheless incorrect, as evidenced by the title card.
xi “Everything the guys think and say and do is all worked out months in advance, based on the little notes the nurse makes during the day. This is typed and fed into the machine I hear humming behind the steel door in the rear of the Nurses’ Station. A number of Order Daily Cards are returned, punched with a pattern of little square holes.” Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Penguin Books, 2016), 28.
xii For all his big talk, when confronted with an actual mental patient who was also an artistic genius, Kesey missed it. In 1976, Kesey told the poet Tony Seymour that he had a run-in with Kaufman’s drive-by poetry on the street in the ’60s, but that he “didn’t really appreciate him as a poet until much more recently, within the last four or five years. In rereading his stuff I could trace back and see how—‘Yeah, yeah! That’s where Ginsberg got that riff, here’s where Kerouac picked up that thing, and that’s where Cassady picked up…’” quoted in Steve Abbott, “Bob Kaufman: Hidden Master of the Beats,” Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat Books, 2019), 201.
xiii The program was preceded by “Project Artichoke,” which was a similar but more vicious program conducted at American bases in West Germany, France, Japan, and Korea. Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (Henry Holt and Company, 2019), 56.
xiv The public only found out about MK-Ultra because a couple boxes of files were misplaced and then discovered, saving them from a document purge. In 1977, when the CIA notified Stanford president Richard Lyman of the secret research, he released the records. Central Intelligence Agency, “Project MKULTRA Collection” (Stanford Digital Repository, 1977), https://purl.stanford.edu/xf259xw8228.
xv Appalled to find out they’d been working for the intelligence agency, two Stanford neurology researchers told the press that they were sure their colleague Wallace Chan was the CIA liaison, and reporting seemed to bear it out. Chan later became a vice provost at UC Davis. Bob Beyers, “Stanford Reveals CIA Links,” New Scientist, October 13, 1977, 81; “New Vice Chancellor at Davis U.C. Named,” Daily Independent Journal—San Rafael, September 14, 1962, 21.
xvi Apparently he was pissed off that they never paid him money he was owed from the OSS. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (Grove Press, 1985), 52.
xvii The ONR funding gets a single half-sentence in The Lucifer Effect, here.
Chapter 3.4
How to Destroy an Empire
ChiCom Cuts the Paper Tiger in Korea—Domestic Decolonization—Rise of the Black Panthers—Third World California—The War in Palo Alto
At the close of the Second World War, America stood head and shoulders above the international community. Not only did the United States captain the democracies to victory, it also did so without significant damage to its home territories. While the Soviets and Europeans rebuilt, America amassed weapons of mass destruction, strapping the country to a ballistic missile and launching it into the economic future. Using Shockley’s man-month efficiency equations and the nuclear bomb, the country readied for a qualitative jump in national power. Now America could project its authority everywhere with the push of a button, the cost in its own blood and treasure reduced to new lows. Strategic bombing made victory so comparatively cheap that political changes anywhere in the world became subject to internal American deliberation. Washington was the capital of the free world, and soon that would be the whole world, an ever-vigilant bald eagle tucking the grateful planet into bed.
Just one problem: It wasn’t really working. The Allied victory elevated and strengthened left-wing forces around the world, led by the Soviets—a people who spent nearly the entire first half of the century at war. Russia exited 1945 as battered as any nation ever was but triumphant, with a claim on the future at least as strong as capitalist America’s. And if the West had a monetary advantage, the Communist International was better positioned when it came to the main political issues in the postwar Third World: decolonization and land reform. Fascism interrupted the conflict between deputized colonial leaders installed near the close of the nineteenth century and the national liberation movements that opposed them. The sides paused and realigned according to the war alliances. But the core issues of popular sovereignty and economic democracy were yet unresolved across the colonized world. As soon as the World War II guns stopped firing, the anticolonial struggle resumed.
