Races: A Marriage of Enlightenment

(See Cover]

“This is a family matter,” the father of the bride insisted. “It’s going to be handled in a family way.” And Dean Rusk made it stick. A hermetic shroud of secrecy effectively surrounded the advance preparations, and when he escorted Margaret Elizabeth Rusk down the aisle of Stanford University’s Memorial Church, the assembly of 60 was limited to personal friends and kin. The shortened Episcopal service took barely a dozen minutes. Then the whitegowned bride, smiling fetchingly and seemingly relaxed, emerged with her equally poised husband, Guy Gibson Smith.

They posed indulgently for photographers, Guy bussing Peggy’s cheek on demand. One cameraman complained that he had dropped his film. “Anyone else lose his film?” asked Guy, as sprightly as the yellow rose in his lapel. He kissed Peggy three more times for retakes. As the wedding party took off for a reception at a friend’s home, the pictures and wire stories raced across the country to land on front pages nearly everywhere. Family matter or no, the wedding was social history rather than society-page fare. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State of the U.S., native of Cherokee County, Ga., and grandson of two Confederate soldiers, had given his only daughter’s hand to a Negro.

Resignation Offer. As recently as 1948, California law would have made the union a criminal offense in the state. Until last June, when the U.S. Supreme Court killed Virginia’s miscegenation law, 16 states still banned interracial marriage. More to the point, and more poignant, in a year when blackwhite animosity has reached a violent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to the marriage of true minds, color should be no impediment. Indrawn as usual, Rusk pronounced himself “very pleased.” Clarence Smith, Guy’s father, said simply: “Two people in love.”

It was not quite that simple. Guy, 22, and Peggy, 18, took on more than the double risk of a young and mixed marriage when they exchanged rings and vows. The wedding bells rang also for Dean Rusk. Protocol makes the Secretary of State No. 1 in the President’s Cabinet, and Lyndon Johnson has made him No. 1 in presidential esteem and trust. Anything that affects Rusk personally also affects the Administration politically. Thus there was credibility to the speculation that Rusk, when informing Johnson of the wedding, offered to resign if the White House considered that necessary.

There was never any prospect that Johnson would accept such an offer, because of his great reliance on Rusk, because Rusk’s resignation over his daughter’s choice of a husband would be a major political disaster for the Administration, and because there is little likelihood that the President would find the marriage embarrassing. (In any event, as of this week Rusk has outlasted all but six of his predecessors.) But the mere fact that the hint of resignation was reported, and allowed to goundenied by both Rusk and the White House, underscored the kind of pressure that the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith knowingly accepted.

Equal Treatment. Mixed unions are hardly strange to Americans, going back to John Rolfe’s marriage to Pocahontas in 1614. In the same era, colonial elders became so concerned about the number of marriages between white indentured women and Negroes that they began writing laws to prohibit them. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, son of a Negro mother and white father, who became the nation’s Minister to Haiti in 1889, divorced a Negro and later married a white woman, explaining blithely that he “wanted to be fair to both races.” Negro-white miscegenation, in fact, had a brief vogue after the Civil War and then declined until the post-World War II period, when gradual loosening of racial sanctions chipped further at the taboo.

Many of the prominent Negroes who have taken white spouses have come from the laissez-faire world of show business: Lena Home, Pearl Bailey, Paul Robeson, Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis Jr. Some civil rights activists, such as James Farmer, formerly chief of CORE, and the late Walter White, the N.A.A.C.P.’s longtime executive secretary, went the same route. Massachusetts’ Senator Edward Brooke has an Italian wife, but the wedding was long ago and far away from public view; by the time it became noteworthy, Negro Brooke, rather than his Caucasian spouse, had led the family into the Establishment.

Bug in the Brain. The Smith-Rusk marriage is like none of these: it resembles more closely the 1953 wedding of another Margaret known as Peggy, the daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain’s onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer. His Peggy wed Joseph Appiah, son of an Ashanti chief and now a legal adviser to the Ghanian government. Britain took it without hysteria.

Peggy Rusk, like Peggy Cripps, brought as her dowry a famous name (but not much else; the Rusks are not wealthy). No hippie or swinger, the Rusks’ brunette daughter is an attractive, serious-minded student of simple tastes who won a D.A.R. prize for academic and citizenship excellence in the ninth grade. Precisely because of her sobriety and wholesome appearance, almost any parents could visualize her as their own young daughter plunging into intermarriage. “This,” Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal (An American Dilemma) said a few years ago, “is a kind of bug in the white man’s brain—that the Ne gro is anxious to marry his daughter.”

Despite the white man’s bug, the marriage did not unleash the kind of storm that it would have stirred only a few years ago.

In this may lie its ultimate social significance. In Washington, a few Democrats muttered privately about political damage next year, and the feeling of shock was obvious, but apprehension was scattered and not taken very seriously. Some Southerners who support Rusk on Viet Nam policy and generally admire him were privately indignant, and at least some of his enemies thought they smelled his undoing. “How could she have done it to him?” was a common reaction in Dixie. On the floors of the House and Senate, however, silence was the rule. Indeed, there had been a far greater outcry over Justice William Douglas’ successive (albeit intraracial) marriages than over the Smith-Rusk wedding, which, after all, only indirectly involved a high public official and had been handled with notable grace and discretion.

“Stand Down, Monkey.” The State Department received a few hundred nasty letters and calls, just as here and there around the country the kooks and bigots relieved themselves of excess bile at Rusk’s expense. An American Nazi Party captain in El Monte, Calif., declared: “I’d probably kill any of my children before I’d let them do such a thing.” His reaction was echoed by a respectable businessman lunching at the Westmoreland Country Club in Glenview, Ill.: “If I were Rusk, I’d be inclined to shoot the guy.” A grande dame at the Orlando Country Club in Florida gloated: “It will serve the old goat right to have nigger grandbabies.”

And there was the inevitable round of tasteless gossip and sick jokes. “Do you know what Smith said to Rusk at the altar?” runs one gibe. ” ‘Awright, now stand down, honkey!'” In New York, Black Power Agitator Lincoln Lynch denounced Rusk as a “subconscious racist” and added, only half in jest: “I wonder to what lengths Dean Rusk has to go in order to gain support for his and Johnson’s war in Viet Nam.” Studs Terkel, a Chicago writer and radio commentator, had nothing against the wedding, but as an Administration detractor could not resist a crack: “L.B.J. is at work again. The next thing you know, we’ll be reading that the bombing of China was led by a Negro.” And a Boston psychiatrist detected L.B.J.’s heavy hand of consensus behind it all. The next Cabinet bride, he said, will exchange vows with “a Navy officer who is half Jewish and half Italian with kin in New York and California. The ceremony will take place in a helicopter over Haiphong.”

Campus Calm. Literary Critic Dwight Macdonald, an indefatigable adversary of current foreign policy, had to admit: “Well, I guess it restores my faith in Dean Rusk—there’s something good in everyone.” Editor in Chief Chris Friedrichs of the Columbia College Daily Spectator detected little campus excitement over the wedding. But he observed that it was an embarrassment to liberals: “They had all these negative feelings toward Rusk, but now they have this charming story to contend with.”

With some vocal exceptions, students generally took the marriage more calmly than did their elders. Even at the University of Texas in Austin, Lloyd Doggett, president of the student body, seemed to speak for the majority when he said: “Everybody has a right to marry whom he wants.” Joel Connelly, a Notre Dame junior, thought: “Everyone will stare at them. But I think they can make a go of it. They had the guts to take the biggest step.” A participant in a Grinnell College seminar reported: “Everybody thought it was wonderful.”

A graduate student at the University of Miami confessed that he was “just a little relieved to see the bridegroom is so white. I guess it would have been different if he had been a real black buck.” Certainly elements of old-style racism tinged the reaction, especially in the South. Many standpatters have argued that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations have wanted nothing so much as the “mongrelization of the races.” To them, the Rusks are knowing agents of this conspiracy. Yet the response was muted almost everywhere. Although sex is the most emotional racial bugaboo, an Atlanta advertising man pointed out that last week’s cries of anguish were far fewer and quieter than in 1963, when Charlayne Hunter, who had helped integrate the University of Georgia, married the son of a prominent white Georgia family. Many parents in all parts of the country, projecting themselves into a situation of a Negro Montague or a white Capulet, could fear for their children’s happiness. But they also had to realize that young Americans today are determined to set their own life styles, regardless of parental dictates.

“Affair of State.” Most newspapers, North and South, played the story heavily but straight. Front-page pictures and reports were the rule, and most headlines reported the bridegroom’s race. But editorials on the subject were scarce, although the Richmond News Leader called mixed marriages “eccentric” and said that “anything that diminishes his [Rusk’s] personal acceptability is an affair of state.” New York Post Columnist Harriet Van Home was sympathetic, commenting that “the intimate joys and sorrows of public figures must inevitably become the common gossip of the marketplace.”

Negro leaders tended toward restraint. Some of the extreme militants, who actively oppose interracial romance, nattered a bit. Many others, such as Martin Luther King, preferred to view the match as a personal affair. “Individuals marry,” said King, “not races.” The Rev. James Woodruff of St. Anselm’s Episcopal Chapel in Nashville, Tenn., observed: “Most people were surprised. They feel she was a pretty lucky girl to get such a promising young man. I feel that way too.” At the A. Philip Randolph Institute in New York City, headquarters of the intellectual Bayard Rustin, the comment for publication was “mazel tov.” Institute staffers also parodied more militant Negroes by remarking: “Tokenism again! She only married one Negro.”

Some prominent Negroes saw the wedding as an event of major social import. James Meredith proclaimed it “perhaps the most significant thing to date in Government to affect in a favorable way the racial situation in the Linked States.” “To me,” said John Johnson, publisher of Ebony, “the marriage is a measure of America’s maturity, and it might help us in the eyes of the world.” Judge Vaino Spencer, a Los Angeles municipal court judge who viewed the marriage both as a Negro and a woman, observed: “That two young, attractive, well-educated people, both from such nice families, should be able to marry today with their parents present is a very special thing. It shows a tremendous change in attitude on the part of people from both groups.”

Critical Cherokee. Not as far as Peggy’s parents were concerned. Dean Rusk left the South, physically and otherwise, more than 30 years ago. His wife Virginia is from Seattle. Rusk has consistently stood up for civil rights, even while an Army captain in World War II, when he broke the color line at an officers’ mess by bringing an OSS officer named Ralph Bunche to dine with him. Although his official role seldom requires it, he vigorously defends the legitimate aspirations of the Negro.

Peggy went to integrated public schools in Washington, though many of her father’s colleagues live either in the white suburbs or else send their chil dren to private schools. Rusk’s older son, David, 26, is a militant civil rights activist and staff member of the Urban League in Washington who has known his new brother-in-law for three years and calls him “a very fine fellow.” (A second son, Richard, 21, attends Cornell University.) But there was a shortage of Rusks at the wedding. Dean Rusk’s brother Parks, an Atlanta-Miami public relations man, Brother Roger and their sister Mary preferred to not talk about it. Said Parks’s secretary: “He’s very upset about it. None of the Rusk family attended, you know.” Neither did any Smiths, except for the bridegroom’s parents. Mrs. Rusk’s clan turned up in force.

In North Georgia’s Cherokee County (pop. 25,700), where many of Rusk’s relatives still live, the reaction was tempered but unmistakably negative. “As far as I’m concerned,” said Cousin Harold Rusk, 51, a feed and poultry dealer, “I’d rather people marry somebody of their own race.” “But,” he added, “that’s their business.” Cousin Ernest Stone, owner of a service station, was more emphatic: “I think he should’ve done something about it, not let it get this far. He should’ve prevented it.” With the characteristic concern for manners over morals that typifies many Southern attitudes, some Cherokee residents were more disturbed over Rusk’s rejection of the role of the indignant father than the fact of the marriage. “In the eyes of Georgians,” said a local newspaper publisher, “he did a bad thing when he walked down the aisle and gave her away.” Said another cousin: “It sounds as if it was all done with his knowledge.”

No Routine Outrages. It was. The couple met four years ago, and their dating became steadier as time went by. Guy, a handsome, highbrowed, square-jawed young man, visited the Rusk house frequently, escorted Peggy to an occasional football game, took her bowling, and made no secret of his existence. Little notice was taken of the teenage romance, however, outside their circle of family and friends. For one thing, Rusk has always assiduously shielded his family from publicity. For another, Guy’s complexion and features made many casual acquaintances think that he was perhaps Mediterranean rather than a Negro.

Neither did Guy suffer most of the routine affronts that face a Negro growing up in the U.S. His father, Clarence L. Smith, is now a $10,900-a-year civilian analyst of military penal procedures at the Pentagon. His mother, Artenia Gibson Smith, of American Indian and Negro descent, has been a teacher and counselor in Washington’s public schools for the past 33 years. The Smiths took pains to insulate their only child from the abrasions of ghetto life.

Sweaty Hands & a Prize. Comfortably settled in an integrated Northeast Washington neighborhood, the Smiths enrolled their only child in the progressive Georgetown Day School, established in 1945 with the aim of forestalling any sense of racial separateness in children’s minds. Guy was in a minority, but not by all that much: 30 of Georgetown Day’s 100 pupils were Negroes.

“At first,” recalls one teacher, “he was a wild boy. He threw his desk around sometimes. But then he settled down. He’s really sweet, with a natural, outgoing personality.” So outgoing that by the ninth grade he was elected president of his class, of the student council, and was earning straight As.

The protective parental umbrella over Guy began to shred when, at 14, he left Georgetown Day and enrolled at Hawthorne, another progressive private school, located in the now reconstructed slum of Southwest Washington. Though not the first Negro to enter Hawthorne, Guy was the first to stay there, and eventually won a prize for being the best all-round student. Soon, though, he realized that he was a Negro, and some of what that meant. In an annual school forum on race relations, he shocked his white friends by saying: “Whenever I’m in a room with mostly white students, my hands begin to sweat.”

Incongruously, Guy became fairly conservative among white students who were almost exclusively liberal Democrats. He was tagged “the Great Dissenter” for so often taking the opposition viewpoint in class discussions on almost any subject. But if he developed an independent political attitude at Hawthorne, he also discovered an independent attitude toward himself. Says Alexander Orr, who founded the school with his wife: “He was solid, happy, and proud to be a Negro.”

Confident Gait. Probably nothing kept him happier than Navajo, the rebellious cutting horse owned by a stable Guy patronized. Clarence Smith remembers that Guy had always been “horse-happy.” “I have a saddleback,” says the father, “from crawling around and playing horse for him when he was a tiny squirt.” When Guy found that he was one of the few riders who could manage the stubborn pinto, ownership became the only way out. Clarence Smith bought Guy the horse, and it became, in the father’s words, an “only brother” to Guy, and later the “common denominator” between Guy and Peggy. At 13, Guy would hurry off from Georgetown Day at 3 p.m. each day to ride in Rock Creek Park. With Navajo he entered horse shows and won ribbons. And it was through the pinto that, at 18, he met his bride-to-be, then only 14 years old.

Guy Smith had frequently dated white girls in high school, but, say his parents, he had never been serious about any of them. Then, in Rock Creek Park, he met Peggy and began riding with her, she on a rented horse at first. Then she began riding Navajo as much as he, and won jumping prizes on Guy’s horse.

His love for the pinto in part determined his decision to attend Washington’s Georgetown University, just a ten-minute walk from the park stables. As a freshman, he expatiated on an assigned English essay subject: “Status Symbols.” “Success is the true status symbol,” he wrote. To Guy, Navajo was the highest symbol, and he owned it.

Guy did well at Georgetown, though not brilliantly, earning A’s in his history major, B’s and C’s in most of his other subjects. One summer, when he was not cantering through the park with Peggy and Navajo, he worked as a counselor in a Southwest Washington playground, supervising Negro children. “And that’s the kind of thing,” says Principal Orr, “that Guy wants to do when he gets out of the service—something that involves him with people.”

In fact, he may decide to make military service—the most integrated segment of American society—his career. Guy won an ROTC commission at Georgetown, ranking among the top six officers in the cadet corps, and is now waiting to enter Army helicopter school, for which he volunteered. He will probably go to Viet Nam after completing the course, and will do at least a five-year hitch in the service. In the interim, he is working as a data processor at NASA’s Ames Research Center near Stanford, where Peggy is now a sophomore.

She has been a hyperactive student. Besides having a variety of part-time jobs, including baby-sitting and house cleaning, she works on the Stanford Daily and helps run the university’s International Center. Peggy has had to sit through interminable and often emotional discussions of Viet Nam and hear her father’s policies attacked. She is as cool an opponent in these sessions as she is at bridge, which she plays with skill and determination. Guy moved to California, after graduating from Georgetown last June, to be near Peggy, who was taking summer courses at the university. They have already shipped their aging, somewhat flabby pinto Cupid to the Coast.

Telling, Not Asking. Peggy impresses her teachers and fellow students as eminently levelheaded, fazed neither by her father’s rank nor by the social hazards of having had a steady Negro beau. At Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest Washington, she edited the yearbook and made the honors category every year. By last fall, when she was ready to enter Stanford, she and Guy were informally engaged. She wore no engagement ring, but brought Guy around the State Department’s seventh floor so that her father’s secretaries could meet the fellow she had talked about so often. Guy never formally asked the Rusks for her hand. When Peggy and Guy decided last winter to marry, they simply told their parents about it. Said a Stanford classmate: “She was very mature about it. She knew that bigotry was something they would have to face, but something she was willing to endure.”

Peggy also confided in one of her high school teachers, who recalls: “It was a carefully thought-out decision.” Mrs. Rusk discussed the courtship with the teacher and, according to the confidante, “never asked me to try to discourage Peggy and never showed any sign of disapproval.” While Rusk was understandably troubled about the problems of a mixed marriage, he seemed even more concerned about Peggy’s youth. The United Church of Christ minister who performed the ceremony, University Chaplain B. Davie Napier, detected no family hostility to the match. He discussed the problems of intermarriage with Peggy and Guy, found them well aware of the risks. As to their tender ages, Napier said: “Peggy, for her years, is amazing. She has a kind of maturity, a solidity, going way beyond her years. And Guy, he’s one of the loosest, calmest, easiest fellows —of any race.” Guy’s mother concurs.

Discussing his future with her son, she found him thinking, but not worrying, about its complications. He wants to have children and once remarked: “Don’t worry, I can educate them in Switzerland if I have to.” Says Clarence Smith: “If anybody can make this work, Guy and Peggy can.”

The Brother-in-Law Gambit. The secrecy and lack of pomp at the ceremony gave rise to the inevitable rumors that the Rusks were trying to downplay the marriage. It was held in California because a Washington wedding would have increased the political ramifications and made it more difficult to keep the guest list unofficial. Moreover, a Washington bash would certainly have increased pressures on the young couple. Jack Foisie, a Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent and brother of Mrs. Rusk, explained to the press that the families wanted “to give the kids a break on the takeoff, because they’re going to have enough problems.” Not incidentally, the parents were set on eluding the antiwar pickets who dog Rusk’s every appearance.

A simple cover was devised. Rusk went to California early in the week, accompanied only by security men, to brief a group of businessmen in Beverly Hills on the war. He then went up to the Bay Area ostensibly to see Brother-in-Law Foisie, who had returned from his post in Bangkok for medical treatment. At the campus church, the wedding roster read Smith-Foisie rather than Smith-Rusk. Although perhaps 200 people in California and Washington knew of the wedding, the essential details were not known until hours before the wedding. One of the few hitches occurred just before Rusk was to enter the church from a dimly lighted side room. Maid of Honor Anne Kogler’s hem came unstitched, and as Chaplain Napier’s wife groped to thread a needle, Rusk obligingly lit paper matches and—not for the first time—risked having his fingers burned.

That night the Secretary of State was back in Washington, advising both his own aides and the White House that he did not want any official statements—or unofficial ones for that matter—to be put out about the wedding. Next day he was meeting with visiting Latin American foreign ministers, imperturbably puffing his usual Lark. His daughter and new son-in-law were off on a long-weekend honeymoon in Southern California. Peggy was due back at Stanford and Guy at his job this week, both with a little history-making behind them.

Colliding Color Blurs. How much history? No one could say, least of all the principals. Historian Arnold Toynbee once mused that world peace could come from only two sources: world government or racial amalgamation. Which will take longer remains to be seen, and some experts predict a ten-century wait before the colors blend in the U.S. alone (see ESSAY).

Clearly, Peggy and Guy Smith’s example will not hasten that day by any appreciable degree. It is unlikely that they care. Nonetheless, their marriage will doubtless be long remembered as a benchmark in the troubled history of race relations in the U.S.

The father of the groom, for one, believes that the fact Peggy and Guy could marry with some prospect for happiness “is an outgrowth of 20th century enlightenment. There is a oneness in the world and a general feeling of equality of man.” Even after the bitter summer of 1967, in which black and white collided so often and recklessly, the brave and happy marriage of Peggy Rusk and Guy Smith was a reminder to Americans that the blurred, contending forces of violence are made up after all of individuals capable of the closest human union, regardless of politics, shibboleths and chauvinism—black or white.