First of four parts
Paul Bloom was mortified.
His graduation from Amherst College, just the day before, represented the greatest achievement of his young life. But now, on June 4, 1966, he looked incredulously at the front page of The New York Times and thought his shining future was about to crash. Criticizing Amherst? Publicly protesting against the U.S. government? He would never do that.
Bloom had absorbed two commandments from his working-class Jewish family in New York. One was to sacrifice in pursuit of a goal. That meant studying hard to get into a college like Amherst: the ticket to the good life. The other was to be quiet and fit in, embodied by his mother’s decision to put up a Christmas tree. Years later, Paul would describe the ethos as, “We’re here now. We have to duck our head and be invisible.”
Through his college years, he had followed the plan to a T. The valedictorian of his high school class on Long Island, he struggled to keep up at Amherst. Day after day he hit the library, grimacing at the C in organic chemistry, pushing ahead, med school in his sights. Though physically attracted to some classmates, particularly the swimmers, at the still all-male school, he buried those feelings. After all, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) still categorized homosexuality as a psychiatric illness. Paul did what was expected. Joined a fraternity. Met the girl from Smith on a blind date as a sophomore. Ultimately they would marry, have two children, send one back to Amherst.
Around him in his student days, the Sixties were swirling, but Paul had little time or inclination to notice. He was dimly aware that a classmate of his, a kinetic character with whom he shared a last name — Marshall Bloom — had spent time in jails in the South while working on behalf of civil rights. Paul occasionally read Marshall’s lively articles in The Amherst Student, but he seldom attended the presentations Marshall’s group “Forum” brought to Amherst College (such as the night they hosted Timothy Leary, talking about the wonders of LSD, at Johnson Chapel). For Paul Bloom, that was not part of the plan. Head down, straight ahead.
“I really wasn’t ready to be involved in that,” he said. “I just wanted to do well and become a doctor. I kind of closed my mind to other things.”
And it worked. He graduated with honors in English (“a poet in my heart”) and got into medical school at the University of Mississippi. His parents and three younger siblings came up to Amherst from Long Island to celebrate on Friday, June 3, 1966. Sure, it proved to be a strange event — what with 20 classmates walking out on their own commencement to protest the awarding of an honorary degree to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara — but Paul Bloom was not going to worry about it. This was a proud, proud moment for the Bloom family.
Until, that is, they opened The New York Times the next day and saw a front-page story on the graduation walkout, one of the first prominent anti-war protests in the country. The article quoted Paul B. Bloom, an honors graduate from Manhasset, New York, saying that the protest was not an expression of “any hatred of college or country, but rather opposition to honoring the leader of the war effort in Vietnam.” Bloom described the decision to award the honorary degree to McNamara as being in “extremely poor taste.”
There was just one problem with the story. Paul Bloom hadn’t said any of those words.
Marshall Bloom had.
Paul panicked. He and his family huddled and summoned a strategy: call The New York Times immediately and demand a correction (which was, in fact, printed the next day on the bottom of Page 18). “I’m on my way to Mississippi,” Bloom remembers thinking. “Now they’ve got me on the front page of The New York Times walking out on the secretary of defense, and I’m their only Jewish student, and they burn Jews in Mississippi.”
A half century later, at age 72, Paul Bloom returns to Amherst on Wednesday for his 50th college reunion, a time of nostalgia and a time of reckoning. His class of 1966 is, by any measure, an accomplished crew. Many are retired now, or on the verge, but their ranks include people who have been some of the nation’s top lawyers and doctors. There are investment bankers and politicians and authors of all stripes. There is an astronaut, a MacArthur Fellow, and quite a few who have earned their own Wikipedia pages.
Paul Bloom is no slouch. Just this year he retired after 45 years in community medicine, working as a doctor in underserved communities like the South Bronx and Haverstraw, New York. He became in time a political presence, marching for many causes he believed in, including LGBT rights. Though still married to Rae, his long-ago girlfriend from Smith, Paul came out as gay almost 30 years ago. In almost every way, he returns to his alma mater with his head held high.
But about his near-namesake Marshall Bloom, Paul still harbors guilt. He has come to believe that Marshall was not just far ahead of him, but far ahead of his time. He thinks now that they could have been great friends. “I say that with some wistfulness and some embarrassment,” says Paul. “I just wasn’t ready yet. I was unformed.”
Marshall Irving Bloom was a comet of the counterculture. He put himself on the line for civil rights in the South. He became an icon of the alternative press, the co-founder of the Liberation News Service. He donned his Sergeant Pepper costume and burned his draft card, but also engaged a classmate who had gone to fight in Vietnam, writing repeatedly to him (“I must speak as someone who loves America, who is sickened at the thought of what we are doing in Vietnam and to the Vietnamese, and, I hope, as your friend”). Marshall Bloom also launched one of the first back-to-the-land communes, the Montague Farm, which would become the fertile crescent of some of the Pioneer Valley’s most vibrant activism. And, too, Marshall was gay.
He wasn’t just of the Sixties. To the people in the Amherst Class of 1966, Marshall was the Sixties: in all its idealism, energy, and shattering disappointment. As one classmate would later write:
“He yearned for simplicity in which he could experience more directly the spontaneous and exhilarating effects of a direct relationship with nature; but in the end, his remorseless honesty prevented him from making the equivocations, the compromises, and the rationalizations which have made life bearable for the rest of us.”
Marshall Bloom would not make it out of the Sixties. On Nov. 1, 1969, he took his own life just outside the Montague Farm after 25 years of blazing intensity.
He has been gone for more than 46 years as the Amherst Class of 1966 gathers for its 50th reunion, but he remains a presence in their collective memory.
“I just wasn’t ready to befriend him,” Paul Bloom remembers. “Years later, reading about the interesting life he had, and the bravery he had, and all of the sadness at the end of his life, was sort of heartbreaking. I wish I’d gotten to know him better.”
TOMORROW: Marshall Bloom’s political awakening at Amherst – and beyond.
Former Gazette staff writer Martin Dobrow is a professor of communications at Springfield College. Marshall Bloom is one of the central figures in his forthcoming book about civil rights.