‘Good-natured louts,’ ‘cosmopolitan’ women

George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat, ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, political scientist and writer. He advocated a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely, wrote about foreign policy and analyzed international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study for nearly half a century.

In February 1965, when I was a student at Ripon College, the distinguished American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan, whose father (Kossuth Kent Kennan, Class of 1875) had attended the school, visited the campus to deliver a lecture and speak with students.

His views of the student body, I later learned, were mixed. Our faces were

“open, pleasant ones,” he wrote. But to my chagrin, he rendered a particularly harsh judgement on me and my fellow male students, calling us “good-natured louts” who were decidedly inferior to the more “cosmopolitan” women on campus.

Kennan — perhaps best known as the author of the “Long Telegram,” written in 1946, which outlined a new “containment” policy for dealing with the Soviet Union — was met at the train station in Columbus, Wisconsin, by members of the Ripon College history department. From there, he was driven to Ripon, he wrote, “over wide straight roads, past frozen, snow-covered fields and prosperous dairy farms with beautiful red barns and less beautiful houses done in the dirty yellow brick of the region …” He was a week shy of his 61st birthday.

He wrote that the “girls” at Ripon, in his view, were more mature than the “men” and superior to them, too, “socially and in style: more cosmopolitan, less provincial, more part of the age, in general more like modern women in Vienna or Milan or wherever else you like than the men of similar age in those places.”

Kennan said that Ripon’s female students clearly took a larger view than the men did of the competitive sphere in which they considered their lives to evolve — the reflection of an awareness, perhaps, of the relative uniformity in women’s problems everywhere.

The Ripon men, however, were “goodnatured louts” who were “immersed in their world of records and athletics and fraternities and summer jobs, mildly curious about the great wide world beyond, but less closely keyed to it than the women. It is the woman who is truly international.”

Kennan wrote that his visit to Ripon had been controversial. His invitation, he said, had come from the history department, which was chaired by John F. Glaser, and not from the College.

“I (was) too liberal, if not worse,” Kennan wrote, adding that the conservative “political atmosphere” of Ripon and the surrounding areas at the time made him unwelcome in some quarters.

Kennan, who was born in Milwaukee, was a Midwesterner at heart — although he would leave the region for good in 1921, at 17 years old, to attend Princeton University and never return. His enduring fondness for, and understanding of, the Midwest was clear in his writings throughout his life.

Recalling his visit to Ripon in 1965, for instance, he captured the uniqueness of the region in his 1989 memoir Sketches From a Life, in which he described Wisconsin’s “strange, still flatness” as being “like no other flatness, subdued and yet exciting, as though filled with deep unspoken implications. … I knew I was close to home.”

Kennan said that, in the Midwest, a bank of clouds appearing on the horizon could create the illusion of a range of low mountains. “What, one wondered, would life and people have been like had there been such a mountain range there?” he asked. “Life, presumably, would have been more varied, more violent, more interesting; but the massive inert power of the Midwestern tradition, with all its virtues and all its weaknesses, sufficient to constitute the spiritual heart of a nation, would not have survived.”

His family had come to Wisconsin more than a century earlier by way of Scotland, Ireland, Massachusetts, Vermont and New York. So, on returning there in 1965, he felt at home.

Later, he would recall that the face of Ripon was overwhelmingly that of a small New England town, with its wide streets lined with tall trees, spacious lawns and quiet, well-worn wooden houses. But the houses, he said, were uninspiring, noting that “like so many other Victorians,” the builders had prided themselves on the quality of their workmanship and material rather than on creating a thing of beauty.

The old sandstone buildings that dominated the Ripon College campus, moreover, which were “already in existence when my father came to the place ninety-five years ago,” were “severe and without architectural ambition, presiding “stubbornly, self-assertively, without apology or compromise, over their changed and changing environment.”

On the evening of Feb. 11, 1965, as a blizzard began to blow across the Wisconsin farm fields, Kennan delivered a lecture to several hundred students and faculty in the school’s “bare-boned gymnasium, with its shiny floors, its overhanging basketball boards, and its faint smell of sweaty tennis shoes.”

Not surprisingly, given his years as a diplomat, he spoke about international affairs and, in particular, the tendency of the United States to make “moral crusades” out of its involvement in other countries.

“It is simply not in character for such a country as ours,” he told his audience, “to try … to produce great changes in the lives of other people, to bring economic development and prosperity to everyone, and to assure to everyone complete peace and security under law.”

Kennan died in Princeton, New Jersey, on March 17, 2005. He was 101 years old.

GARY G. YERKEY ’66 WASHINGTON, D.C.

Yerkey majored in philosophy at Ripon College. He spent more than a decade in Europe and the Middle East reporting for TIME-LIFE, Christian Science Monitor, ABC News, International Herald Tribune and other U.S. news organizations. He is currently a writer based in Washington, D.C., and has written numerous books.