Peace Be with You: Leftist Activism at John Carroll University, 1967–69

During the 1960s the daughters and sons of America’s “greatest generation” formed pockets of resistance to the established cultural, political, and social structures of the United States to create an identity that subverted official socio-ideological discourse. These individuals, many of them students, challenged the power structures of the nation through activities that ranged from the militant mobilization and organization of largely marginalized and traditionally apolitical groups within American society to a commitment to participatory democracy and/or revolutionary violence. These challenges revealed that the base of the nation’s superstructure countered the legitimacy of U.S. power not only through issues of class, gender, and race but also through issues of age, as an unprecedented number of America’s youth first realized their political consciousness and later actualized their political power. The largest and most famous radical New Left organization during the 1960s was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).¹ This group’s activity at larger and more prominent universities is well told, but this article explores how SDS operated at John Carroll University (JCU), a smaller religious institution located in the hotbed of leftist activism in northeast Ohio.

The activities of SDSers at JCU outline how the university’s religious culture reinforced the secular demands for change and why the fusion of religious teachings with leftist ideologies restricted the formation of a distinct SDS identity on the campus. JCU, affiliated with the Jesuit Brotherhood, was founded in the late nineteenth century by Cleveland’s bishop, Richard Gilmour. With the assistance of Father Henry Behrens and Father John Neustich, the Brotherhood opened Cleveland’s first Catholic university, St. Ignatius College. Located in Cleveland’s west side, the university outgrew this location by the early 1920s, forcing university officials to seek a new location. Renamed John Carroll University and moved to University Heights, Ohio, on Cleveland’s east side, construction began on July 5, 1931, and it opened October 7, 1935. The university continued to expand through the 1950s under the direction of President Hugh Dunn, S.J., and enrollment numbers exceeded 2,500 students by 1967.² JCU, like many other Jesuit schools, had a long commitment to social justice, and during the 1960s, had several antiwar clergy members. JCU’s religious culture affected the formation of a distinct SDS protest culture and identity, and the relationship leftist students had with university officials at JCU challenged understandings of SDS and its organizational strategies.

JCU’s size, religious affiliation, and focus on social activism posed difficulties for its SDSers to demonstrate themselves as a unique protest culture to the campus community. Some students felt it largely unnecessary for a revolutionary movement to occur on their campus. Many of JCU’s student activists had already united in opposition to the war in Vietnam and the desire to end poverty in America through social justice because of the Jesuit brothers, who promoted activist sentiment. To further reflect the Brotherhood’s propensity for activism during the 1960s, 27 percent of American Catholic universities had registered leftist organizations by 1967 compared to 85 percent of Jesuit institutions.³ Jesuit clergy activists or “protest priests” were not exclusive to JCU or even northeast Ohio. Many younger Catholic priests found themselves swept up in the turbulent 1960s via radical theology, or “the idea that priests should behave more like Jesus and act on behalf of the alienated, poor, or outcast.” Like many within the New Left, these priests recognized the economic and racial inequalities that plagued the United States, and they felt that “being ‘committed’ was being ‘religious,’ and being a religious person often meant direct action based on conscience, often without regard to the church hierarchy or American law.”⁴ The belief in upholding radical theology caused many priests to participate in protests alongside student activists at a number of Catholic universities. This situation was an important development in the bidirectional power relationship between those who represented the “Establishment” and those who protested against it. When protest activities increased, “Catholic colleges, which could have banned protests, did not,” and even...