Goshen College and the Amish Druids

Even Goshen College, a humble and diminutive Mennonite institution at the south end of Goshen, Indiana, felt the reverberations of the tumultous events of the spring of 1968. In the previous year four editors of an underground magazine irreverently titled "Mennopause" were expelled from the school after much angst and soul-searching on the part of the administration, primarily because the fanatical writers had dared to publish the word "Fuck", a word which was much in the zeitgeist but still highly offensive to the "constituency", primarily comprised of staid Mennonite farmers and burghers.

In March a group of wannabe merry pranksters rented a van and drove north to Racine, Wisconsin, where they canvassed for Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. Upon their return to Goshen, President Lyndon Johnson went on the TV (television was by then an accepted part of Mennonite, although not Amish, life) to declare he would not accept his party's nomination. Two days later he was badly beaten in the Wisconsin primary. Only two days after that, on April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated and the campus was deeply roiled. Students and faculty processed silently and prayerfully down to the town square and held a vigil, where the largely rednecked townspeople honked and hooted at them derisively.

Goshen at the time was a deeply schizophrenic town. One of the birthplaces of the Ku Klux Klan, the small city had not a single African-American resident, and Negroes passing through were advised to leave town by sunset. The high school principal was a fascist who expelled students for suspected Communist leanings. On the other hand, the Mennonite and Church of the Brethren population had leavened such institutions as the draft board to such an extent that obtaining conscientious objector status for nice Mennonite boys was almost de rigeur and routine. Even flaming radicals who burned their draft cards and American flags were treated almost politely by the board, being sent to Chicago to work in hospitals rather than to prison to be raped by the hardened mother-rapers and father-stabbers.

The campus itself was never roiled by the student demonstrations and building takeovers that troubled such secular institutions as Columbia University or the Sorbonne. In fact the closest approximation of such manifestations was a very odd evening which began when twelve hooded monks with flaming torches marched across campus singing a Gregorian chant which had been improvised by one of the future settlers on the Lower East Side (he became a church organist for the Episcopals and later died of AIDS). Understandably, a crowd of several hundred male students soon gathered, marched to the all-girl dormitory of Westlawn where the females were safely sequestered for the night, and began to chant the name of the college president (Paul Mininger) in a sort of lampoon of the big city hard-core protestors. The chant went "Ho Ho Ho Chi Mininger" and drew alarmed and puzzled faculty onlookers from their nearby suburban ranch houses. Finally the mob of male students did what came naturally and staged a panty raid in the basement of another nearby women's dormitory (Coffman Hall), and were finally dispersed by the campus cop (there was only one) who was rumored to carry a gun and went by the sobriquet of "Delmar Dumbfuck."