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Some Memories of Eric Voegelin at Notre Dame

Watching TV

You understand it was 1960 and I was a nineteen year old undergraduate. To give you the setting: Our class was held in the auditorium of the Law School building.  Standard American-Oxford-Gothic law school architecture. The classroom ran the width of the building and there were windows on both sides. In the front was a stage surmounted by a proscenium arch and steps lead from the audience level upto the stage. On the stage was a desk, a lectern on the left side and a blackboard. There were 80 or 100 Voegelin students in a room that might have held 400 or so law students. We sat in comfortable theater seats, unlike the portable student desks found in most classrooms. If memory serves, Dr. Voegelin was always turned out in a well-tailored three piece suit.

I recall one Monday morning. The class bell rang but Voegelin was not poised at the lecturn as was his custom. Instead he paced back and forth across the stage, removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He put his glasses back on and turned in our general direction and said: “I watched television Friday night. And I have not yet recovered!”

I never forgot that and in 1986, when our TV broke down and took a long time to be repaired, I never went back to addictive television watching, even though I experienced withdrawal symptoms and craved TV for a long time.  (The cure has perhaps been undone to some extent by the personal computer and the Internet.  But at least the PC can be “interactive!”)

A footnote: In 1991 Paul Caringella told me Voegelin in his later years would occaisonally watch a TV program without ill-effect. One program  was James Garner’s “The Rockford Files.” Voegelin had learned to enjoy TV,  “Just so long as he wasn’t required to remember it!”

The Mugging

One day I went to class (still in the Law School auditorium)–on a Wednesday, as I recall–and there was a notice posted on the door that class would not meet until the next class day, the following Friday. This was unusal because Voegelin was always reliable and punctual. And I was disappointed because his was the only class that I never cut.

When I came to class on that next Friday I noticed Voegelin had a bright red mark on the bridge of his nose and another on the right side of his forehead. Class went as usual and he said nothing. That weekend we learned that he had been attacked by muggers while walking between his apartment and the University. We were angry and wanted to do something to help. We learned that graduate students were already providing him with a bodyguard. There was nothing useful we could do.

Almost immediately, Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, the then President of the University and the man who was instrumental in bringing Voegelin to Notre Dame, ordered accommodations be prepared for him at the Morris Inn, a hotel at the edge of campus for visitors and alumni. Since the Morris Inn rooms were rather small and spartan, they must have knocked down some walls in order to create enough connected space to create what could be called an apartment.

Many years later Paul Caringella recounted that Voegelin told him he was beaten because he had no money to give the robbers. After the mugging, he made it a point to carry $100 with him at all times so he could reward a robber for his labor and avoid a beating!

Guns, Bull Connor, and Race

In 1960 or ’61, in those days of my youth, friendship was easy and undemanding. We only asked for cordiality and sympathy and humor. I had a friend whom I will call Matt who was an able student in the General Studies program at Notre Dame. One of his foibles, rather unexpected in the Notre Dame setting, was that he had a passion for guns. In fact, at one point he was confronted by the school authorities and required to remove from our residence hall a 9mm Luger automatic pistol along with a box of ammunition.

I had been trying to persuade Matt to come with me and audit one of Voegelin’s lectures. He finally agreed. It was a Monday morning, I think, and over the weekend, an Alabama sheriff named Bull Conner had ordered his deptuties to use dogs and electric cattle prods to break up a Negro civil rights demonstration. It had all been shown on TV and it was an upsetting thing to see.

When Matt and I arrived at the Law School auditorium, Voegelin was already striding back and forth on the stage, appearing agitated and distracted. When the class bell rang he stopped striding and turned to us students. In a loud voice he said: “Someone should go down there with machine guns and teach them a lesson!” Of course by “them” he meant the perpetuators of segregation.

When Voegelin said this I turned to Matt. He was looking at me with a wicked, sly grin.  I had to ask myself, why did I have to bring Matt, of all people, to this lecture on this day!

I later learned Voegelin had once been cautioned, when he began his early teaching stint in Alabama, to keep quiet about race issues. It must have been exceedingly difficult for him, since he knew more and had written more against race theory nonsense than probably any other living man! In fact his books on race were likely the main reason he had to “escape in his socks” from Vienna when the Nazis took occupied Austria.

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Frederick (“Fritz”) J. Wagner graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1962 with a B.A. in English Literature where in the Fall of 1960 he took the political science course by Eric Voegelin. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1968 and worked for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and then entered private practice. He founded the evForum listserve in 1999 and started publishing and editing VoegelinView in 2009-13. His personal website at www.fritzwagner.com.

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