Edwin Black's Cornell University

Edwin Benjamin Black was born in Houston, Texas, on October 26, 1929. He attended the Houston public schools and the University of Houston, from which he graduated in 1951 with a major in philosophy. The University of Houston was founded in 1929, became a private university in 1945, and a public university in 1963. Black enrolled in fall 1951 in the department of Speech and Drama at Cornell University, where he majored in Rhetoric and Public Address, as the Speech side of graduate studies was then called. He earned a Master of Arts in 1953. In his doctoral work, he minored in Philosophy, leaving Cornell in the fall of 1956, still without the degree, to become instructor and then assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1961 he moved to the University of Pittsburgh as assistant professor of Speech and Theater. He earned the Cornell doctorate in 1962.

Marty Medhurst, the editor of this journal, has asked that I try to reconstruct something of Ed Black's Cornell University. I began graduate study in fall 1958, two years after Ed had ended his residency, at a Cornell that was undergoing rapid change, but still with strong memories of Ed Black, who was spoken of with respect and admiration both by faculty and by graduate students who had known him. Ed was marked early as someone special. Cornell was and is a large and diverse university, and it is not clear how much of what was happening at Cornell was known to him, or of any interest to him.¹ Tact often prompts us to be hesitant in asking our elders, even our friends and family, of their recollections, an impulse we often regret when suddenly they are gone. I do not recall that Ed, who later became a friend, ever said much in detail about his Cornell. But some of his friends do recall bits and pieces of observation and testimony, and the public record, including Ed's own published writing, gives glimpses of the Cornell that Ed may have known.

What are now thought of as the quiet 1950s did not always seem so quiet to those living through the years of the McCarthy witch hunts, the intensification of the Cold War, and the beginnings of the civil rights movement, with Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott. Black's longstanding antipathy to Richard M. Nixon might well have been cultivated when Ed was studying rhetoric at Cornell.² When Ed arrived for his second year as a graduate student, he would have picked up a copy of the student paper, the Cornell Daily Sun, "Ithaca's Only Morning Newspaper," on September 22, 1952, featuring two front-page stories about the presidential election campaign. "Nixon Explains Facts on Fund; Ike Still Silent," proclaimed the headline. Nixon had released an audit of his secret fund, but Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower's aides announced that he had still not decided whether to drop Nixon from the ticket. Nixon's "Checkers Speech" was delivered on Tuesday, September 23, 1952. On September 24, the paper reported that Eisenhower, having heard the speech, still had not made up his mind whether to drop Nixon. On October 7, the Sun reported in a headline, "Ithaca to Hear GOP Candidate Richard Nixon in Whistlestop" on October 13. On October 9, the Sun reported that the Nixon whistle-stop had been cancelled so that Nixon could prepare a major speech on television, a speech delivered on October 13, in which Nixon accused Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson of having disqualified himself for the presidency by allowing himself to be deposed in the Alger Hiss perjury trial of 1949, thus reminding his audience of Nixon's claim to fame as an anti-Communist investigator while a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he staged the confrontation between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.³

Nixon rescheduled his visit to Ithaca for Saturday, October 18. Ed Black would certainly have read about it in the Cornell Daily Sun, and perhaps himself hitched a ride with the Young...