Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

During the Senate confirmation hearings on Judge Samuel Alito, the subject of his membership in a group called Concerned Alumni of Princeton was brought up, then quickly pooh-poohed by Republican Senators and the Conservative media. Apparently, membership in a racist organization is okay. Unless it was sixty years ago and your name is Robert Byrd.

Alito’s supporters claimed that he only joined the group in protest of Princeton’s ban on the ROTC. ROTC had been forced to leave campus in 1970. By the time Alito graduated, however, the Army had returned to campus and the administration was negotiating a return for the Navy and Air Force. A few months later, Concerned Alumni of Princeton was formed. The ROTC issue was at best tangential.

The group’s main aim was to go back to the days of, in the words of founder Shelby Cullom Davis, “a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds.” Of the Ivy League schools, Princeton was among the last to integrate. Long after other colleges had gotten rid of them, they had limits on the numbers of Jews, and ironically in Alito’s case, Catholics. Princeton did not even let in women until 1969.

The group continued into the 1980’s (long after any spat over the Army on campus was resolved), when the organization’s newsletter had an essay entitled “In Defense of Elitism” which stated:

People nowadays just don’t seem to know their place, Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they’re black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children.

Yeah, definitely sounds like it was all about the ROTC.

Alito’s involvement with the organization may have been tangential, but his claims that he didn’t know what they were doing ring hollow. High profile alumni had made their position on the organization known for some time. For example, one alumnus, Sen. Bill Bradley, joined the organization, then ditched it and denounced it when it became obvious what they were actually about. Another person that denounced the organization was an obscure Tennessee Heart surgeon named Bill Frist, who is probably some sort of socialist, right?

The thing that is most telling to me about ths incident is that, whatever Alito’s actual involvement in the organization, he felt the need to proudly claim membership when he was applying for a job with the Reagan administration. Why would a guy who is not a racist (I don’t know the guy, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt) feel the need to affiliate himself with such an organization to get a job? It doesn’t say a heck of a lot about the modern conservative movement.