Victoria Foe oral history
- A: Okay. Q: Okay, yeah, the recorder is working. We
- can go ahead and get started. So I’m Samantha Farmer. I am a student at the University of
- Texas at Austin, and I’m interviewing Dr. Victoria Foe. She’s on the phone in Washington.
- And so where were you born, and what year? A: I was born in 1945, right at the end of
- World War II. I was born at an Air Force base, Patterson-Wright Field in Ohio, right before
- -- right as World War II was ending. I spent my first 10 years in Wyoming, Greybull, Wyoming.
- After that, I moved -- my family, when I was 10, moved to Mexico. I lived there for three
- years, then moved to the Canary Islands, in Tenerife. I lived there for another two years.
- Then we moved to England -- Plymouth, England -- and I did what would be my high school
- in Plymouth, England before returning to the United States and starting college, my first
- year of college, in 1963 in Austin at the University of Texas.
- Q: So you did your undergraduate degree at UT as well?
- A: My undergraduate was at UT as well. Yes, it was.
- Q: Okay, and why did your -- was it because of your dad’s service that you moved to
- Mexico and all about? A: No. It -- my father was 20 years older
- than my mother, and when we moved to Wyoming, they were living on a farm and he was doing
- regular heavy (inaudible) work. He was 50 when I was born, so by the time I was 10,
- he was 60, and bucking hay all day and dealing with blizzards, which was really the problem
- in the winter, just got too much for him. So I would say we moved to Mexico to get away
- from winter blizzards in the northern Wyoming High Plains. He taught school in Mexico -- taught
- English to professionals in Mexico, but we did not move because of his work, but to get
- away from horrible weather. Q: Is that the same reason you moved to England
- as well? A: We moved first to the Canary Islands. We
- moved to the Canary Islands basically to get away from waterborne diseases in Mexico, like
- -- well, my father almost died of hepatitis and typhoid in Mexico. We moved to Tenerife
- to get away. To live somewhere where waterborne disease was not the chronic problem it was
- in Mexico at the time we lived there. Then we moved to England from the Canary Islands,
- because my father, at that point, wanted us to be exposed to the British educational system.
- Q: And do you think that your high school years in England affected the kind of student
- you were in college? A: I think that the education I had the last
- year I was in England, which was at -- it was kind of the equivalent of what a junior
- college would be here, but they also took advanced high school students. Was a really
- superb scientific education, which I had not been exposed to anywhere before, Mexico or
- Wyoming or the Canary Islands, to say the least. That certainly influenced my desire
- to become a biologist. My interest in civil rights and humanitarian issues -- as you’ll
- see in the second part of our interview, if we get there -- and US foreign policy, I would
- say, just grew out of having spent five years of my life in much less developed countries,
- Mexico and the Canary Islands, which belongs to Spain, and just being very much aware that
- the rest of the world does not have the standard of living, or the rule of law, or the opportunities
- -- most people don’t -- that we in the United States expected to have.
- Q: So as a college student, the issues that were really important to you were national
- security issues? A: As an undergraduate, I would say I did
- not have deep political concerns. Moving to Texas from England was just a huge cultural
- shock for me, and the first year was just kind of trying to cope with that. You should
- think of all of my college, the undergraduate, and especially the graduate years as I became
- more conscious of anything that was going on in the world -- the backdrop for all of
- that was the Vietnam War. If you have not already done so, you should look into Ken
- Burns’ recent documentary of the Vietnam War. I had some criticisms of that and his
- coverage of that, but you should understand how much that influenced all of us who were
- going to school in the late ’60s and ’70s. So I would say that informed me a great deal.
- Q: What was it about the Vietnam War that kind of led to your increased engagement in
- politics, do you think? A: This will sort of lead into what I view
- as the second part of our interview, but I’ll jump ahead to that a bit. I guess I come to
- things trying to understand and look for the root cause of things, the key thing that holds
- (inaudible) what causes things to happen, not just that they’re happening. It was
- very hard for me to understand why we were involved in this war on the other side of
- the world, against people who posed absolutely no threat to us, nor had they ever done anything
- in opposition to us. In fact, the leader of North Vietnam had, as one of his heroes, Abraham
- Lincoln, and also the Constitution of the US. What he wanted was to have a country that
- was not being dominated by France and then by the US. So it was hard for me to understand
- what on earth drove our foreign policy. At the same time that this was happening, the
- US was involved in many horrendous -- in support of really horrendous regimes in Latin America,
- which I was interested in because I had lived in Mexico and spoke Spanish. So it was trying
- to understand why we did what we did in Chile, why we were supporting dictatorships, incredibly
- brutal dictatorships, in Brazil and Paraguay, and, as I said, Vietnam. Why we were doing
- this. It just made no sense. It looked to me, when I looked around the world, that we
- were on the wrong side, the non-humanitarian side, of pretty much every conflict in the
- world, and I was wanting to try to understand why, what was that about. It was that -- looking
- -- the first question that came out of the Vietnam War, watching that and wondering what
- we were doing and why, and then spread to a broader concern. Does that answer your question?
- Q: Yes. Do you remember the first kind of politically motivated actions you took, and
- what cause it was against or for? A: Sure, I was involved. So many of us were.
- Not as leaders, but as followers, as members in marches. There were many, many marches
- in Austin, as there were around the country, in opposition to the Vietnam War. I can’t
- give you those dates, but I’m sure those were the first actions I was involved in.
- Q: In addition to your antiwar sentiments, how did that grow into your involvement in
- issues concerning Latin America or women’s rights?
- A: I became a graduate student in 1968. I entered the department of zoology. I had a
- fellowship from NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a three-year prestigious
- scholarship. It happened that the United States was taken
- completely off-guard and terrified by the fact that the Soviet Union had put up a satellite
- that orbited the Earth, called Sputnik. It wasn’t an aggressive satellite. It didn’t
- spy on anybody, it didn’t do anything, but it made the US fearful that the Soviet Union,
- which was, compared to the US, a really under-developed country, was leaping ahead of them in technology,
- and potentially in military technology. There was nothing military about Sputnik, except
- that it showed that they could put up very sophisticated satellites. As a consequence
- of that, the federal government decided to push a lot of money into science education.
- The NASA fellowship I had was part of that. They didn’t discriminate between women and
- men -- the fellowships didn’t. They were open not just to men, but to women. You qualified
- by having sufficiently good grades, recommendations, et cetera. For the first time, perhaps ever,
- but certainly that I’m aware of, there was suddenly money pushing students, but women,
- into sciences. I would never have been able to go to a graduate school. My family was
- extremely poor, and I would never have been able to go to graduate school without the
- fellowship. When I got into the zoology department, I discovered that there was not a single woman
- on the faculty. Q: Were there other women students?
- A: There were other women students, and Judy Smith, who I will tell you more about, also
- became a student in that department. So there were other women students, no faculty. When
- I was trying to figure out which lab I wanted to work in, to apprentice myself in, there
- was a lot of pushback from faculty members. One person I won’t mention by name said,
- “Look, if you want to be a woman going into science, you have to be two or three times
- as good as all the men, and probably still won’t get a job.” That was a male professor.
- A woman, who was a very good scientist, had grown up in -- who was in the lab I eventually
- joined, and was sort of a mentor -- had grown up earlier than I had by about 20 years. At
- the time she went to school, women -- and her degree was in chemistry. She wasn’t
- even allowed to do any of the experiments, there was so much prejudice against women.
- The attitude, which was beginning to change, but the predominant attitude was there was
- no point in educating women, because they would get pregnant, or they would get married
- and get pregnant, and then their responsibilities would be taking care of their children and
- their family, and it was a complete waste to educate them in any way that led to an
- advanced degree. It was a complete waste of time, it was a waste of money. So there was
- this prejudice everywhere you’d bump up against, of it’s no point for women to have
- higher education. The reason given for that was because they would get pregnant.
- Well, the obvious solution to that is there should be a way to prevent -- if you were
- a serious student, to not get pregnant. So, historically, birth control pills became available
- in 1964, but the mores of the time were such that you basically -- an unmarried woman,
- and probably most married women who didn’t have already several children, could not get
- it. Doctors simply wouldn't prescribe it. So about this time, the lab I was in, Hugh
- Forest’s Lab, a really remarkable woman called Judy Smith joined the lab. She was
- freshly out of the Peace Corps in Africa. She’s really kind of a born leader. She
- said, “We’re having” -- I think this was in 1968, the fall of the 1968 -- “we’re
- having a bunch of women getting together at my house tonight just to discuss the problems
- of women.” This was basically the first women’s liberation meeting in Austin, Texas.
- “Would you like to come?” I went to that meeting, and the subsequent meetings. We were
- looking for projects that would improve the welfare of women, the well-being of women,
- things that we needed that we could work on together, and very soon hit on that one thing
- that women at the University of Texas needed was more information on birth control options,
- which they needed if they were to continue to be serious students. It was out of that
- simple impetus of self-preservation. Of course we’ve got to do something about making birth
- control information known for women to be taken seriously as students and scholars and
- graduate students. That’s kind of where it all began. Do you want me to continue talking
- about this, or do you want to change topics? Q: Yeah, we can continue talking about this.
- What do you remember -- like what actions this group took, or that you helped with?
- A: Okay, so the first thing we did was we decided we would -- Judy and I, who were both
- -- our training was in biology -- would get together the best information we could get
- together about what was the most effective forms of birth control, what were the safest
- things for women, and we did a few lectures around campus, which we did do. And we also
- -- and then very soon discovered that it was very hard for women to get any of these birth
- control options, because doctors simply did not prescribe them. So the next thing we decided
- to do was to have this Birth Control Information Center, which we had all these things tabulated,
- the information, scientific information, as best we could get it tabulated for women.
- You know, how effective are condoms, how effective are these kind of pills, how effective are
- diaphragms, et cetera. And we then started interviewing doctors, and also collecting
- information for women who had tried to get various birth control -- access to birth control
- from doctors around Austin. That’s really hard -- it was hard to imagine this, except
- in the context, I guess, of a Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein. The horribleness. But many doctors
- felt that a woman who asked, for example, for birth control pills, who was a student
- and not married, had sort of, by doing so, declared herself a harlot, and you could fondle
- her or hit on her or feel her up. Or, the opposite side, doctors would lecture women
- on their morality. “You should not do this out of wedlock,” blah, blah, blah.
- Q: So in both situations, did women still face being denied a prescription in both cases?
- A: Well, the women who would submit to being harassed, sexually harassed by the doctors,
- probably got their prescription. The women who were lectured probably did not. What we
- did at the Birth Control Center, we basically interviewed various doctors, and found doctors
- who, without harassing women, or who just behaved like normal doctors and said, “What
- is it you need? Here’s a prescription. Here’s how you should take it.” You know, just
- treated it as a normal medical option. We were providing information on physicians who
- would give out birth control information. That is where we started, and that’s -- you’ll
- see one thing leads to the next, but that was -- first, it was just giving information
- on birth control options, and then we found out we had to also provide information on
- doctors who would give them without abusing women. Then what happened next was we were
- suddenly hit with all sorts of women -- because we ran an ad with birth control information,
- which we ran out of the YMCA across the street from the university -- women who were desperate
- for abortions, for whom birth control was no longer helpful to them because they were
- pregnant. They were women from all -- they were students, they were non-students, they
- were people of color, they were all sorts of people. Finally started coming, just desperate
- for information on where they could get help with terminating unwanted pregnancies. Which
- was not what we had started to do and not what we’d intended, but here were these
- women who were in desperate need of help for all kinds of reasons. And so, at this point,
- it wasn’t just Judy and me, but there were -- not a large number, but other women who
- had come to this Women’s Liberation meeting, who joined in and took their turns at the
- Birth Control Center, sort of filled in. Q: Where was the Birth Control Center?
- A: It was upstairs at the YMCA. You may have come across a really lovely picture that I
- think Alan Pogue took of Judy Smith answering the telephone, which we were sure was bugged,
- because you could hear the people on the other end.
- Q: Did you know it’s actually a Scientology church now?
- A: No, I did not know that. At the time, it was a very progressive -- it was run by a
- very progressive board. The underground newspaper had its office there. A whole variety of things
- that really served the community. It was not a Scientology center. So no, I’m sorry about
- that. We set about finding out where women could get safe abortions. At this time, in
- California and New York, the law had changed slightly, or maybe (inaudible) interpreted,
- that if a woman’s health was in danger, she could have an abortion. There were some
- doctors who would interpret mental anguish as endangering the woman’s health, and so
- would perform abortions in that situation. Traveling to California or New York was available
- -- or Sweden, where abortion was legal -- was an option for rich people. It was not an option
- for most of us. I, because I speak Spanish, and Judy went to Mexico. I had actually had
- an abortion one time in Mexico. When we went back to Mexico, there were a number of abortion
- clinics on the border in Mexico.
- Abortion was illegal in Mexico, but because of the general corruption, there were doctors
- who paid off police, et cetera, law enforcement, to ignore them, and performed abortions on
- women, including American women who went there. We looked around for clinics that we thought
- were medically really good, who were run by doctors, not laypeople, who had a good anesthesiologist,
- that were clean, and we found -- and we interviewed the doctors and sort of agreed on a price
- for abortions. And so we could send women who were needing abortions -- we could refer
- them there if they couldn’t go to New York or elsewhere. About that time, we started
- to worry, and we helped women -- some women just simply couldn’t raise any money, and
- we helped raise money for people. We provided information and help in every possible way
- we could to women who were really in a terrible situation. I’m trying to remember where
- we are exactly. Judy Smith became especially worried about then -- the law in Texas on
- abortions at that time read that it was criminal, it was a felony, to aid a woman in procuring
- an abortion. The intent of the law was to go after the doctors or midwives or back-alley
- performers of abortion. But what we were doing was also aiding women to find people who would
- perform abortions, and we were worried that we might be criminally liable and we could
- be sent to prison for providing information to people.
- So about that time, Judy, whose partner was a law student, was a classmate of Sarah Weddington,
- a name you will have heard. She and Linda Coffee filed a challenge to the Texas abortion
- law in the district court of Dallas. They filed it there because there was a judge on
- the district court who they thought, because she was a woman, might be sympathetic. They
- filed this in 1970, I think in March of 1970, in the district court. Their case was heard
- in May that year, and decided in their favor that, in fact, that abortion violated a woman’s
- right to privacy and to choose in this most important matter, whether or not to carry
- a pregnancy to term. So they won that. But the district attorney in Dallas, a man called
- Henry Wade, would not enforce that decision and appealed it to the Supreme Court. And
- so Sarah argued this case before the US Supreme Court in 1971, and then again in ’72, and
- the decision that was handed down, again confirming a woman’s right to choose, was in 1973,
- and that’s the case known as Roe v. Wade. Sarah, I think, remains -- the one thing I
- really want to emphasize to you is we were children. Sarah remains the youngest person
- who’s ever argued a case before the Supreme Court.
- Q: Was she a law student still at the time, or had she gotten --
- A: She had just graduated from law school, and because she was a woman couldn’t find
- a job. She had graduated very high in her class, but couldn’t find a legal job because
- she was a woman. It was the same situation everywhere, is that women were just not taken
- seriously. So that’s how Roe v. Wade came to be. Sarah and I and Judy are all the same
- age. In parallel with this was work I did on this issue, but we’re kind of going to
- jump back to 1969. Judy and I and Barbara Hines and other women were all
- doing this sort of direct action, hands on, giving lectures, talking, arguing on the radio,
- having discussions with Catholic priests on the radio, trying to talk to people about
- how absolutely crucial it was that women were to have a full role, functioning, full role
- in the world, they needed to be able to decide when and if to have children, that that was
- key to everything for them. As part of that, in 1969, there were state elections, and our
- precinct -- because I was so involved in this abortion decriminalization by then -- what’s
- the word for it? Proposal that it should be legalized, or decriminalized, and that got
- advanced to the state convention, state Democratic convention. I spoke very passionately on the
- floor to that. We were all astonished. Everyone was astonished. That passed and became a plank
- in the Democratic platform, in the Texas Democratic Party.
- In the legislature, the Texas legislature, which convened in 1970, two senators, Tom
- Creighton and Don Kennard, agreed -- and I don’t -- they clearly weren’t at all interested
- in this issue, and I kind of think it was the Texas Medical Association that put them
- up to it -- but agreed to bring forth a bill rewriting the regulations on abortion. I think
- by then, it was known, or -- I don’t know whether Sarah’s case had yet been won before
- the district court, or they knew it was being challenged and were simply afraid the law
- was going to be overturned, and the doctors wanted to retain medical control of abortion,
- but they wanted a slightly more restrictive law, because of course, given the way the
- law was written, they were the ones who would go to prison for helping women have abortions.
- Q: So the proposal in the Texas legislature was to make it more restrictive?
- A: No, it was to make it -- the way the law had been is all abortion and anybody helping
- them have an abortion, that was a felony. What I think the AMA said was -- I don’t
- know. I don’t think they sufficiently organized to really know exactly what they wanted, but
- I think something like, abortion in the cases of rape, incest, abnormal fetuses, et cetera,
- are okay. Something like that, which is not what we, in the women’s movement, wanted.
- We wanted it not to be a crime. We wanted women to be able to decide, however they got
- pregnant. If I was raped by my step-father, or if I accidentally got pregnant, or my birth
- control failed, or I can’t feed four children and I certainly don’t want a fifth -- women
- and those who were close to them should be able to make these decisions. We did not want
- -- we wanted it to be decriminalized for at least the first six [months] of pregnancy.
- That was my position, and I don’t know exactly what the doctor -- I was always trying to
- kind of out-maneuver the doctors. Because I knew quite a bit from this work I’d been
- doing at the Birth Control Information Center, and I knew what organizations, what church
- organizations, et cetera, supported abortion decriminalization, I had a whole stack of
- these documents, and I basically -- because I had heard the rumor that Tom Creighton and
- Don Kennard were going to advance a bill or write a bill decriminalizing abortion, I took
- a stack of stuff over to them and said, “You should know this,” and they hired me on
- the spot.
- I dropped out of graduate school for about nine months and worked as a legislative assistant
- at the Texas State Senate to oversee the writing of this bill. So this was going on in parallel
- with legal challenges to the bill, and then in parallel to the Birth Control Information
- Center, helping women by going to Mexico or wherever. People who -- I was the one person
- who was hired as a legislative assistant. I was helped by a woman called Bea Vogel,
- who was another biologist. She was older than I was. She was not working inside the legislature,
- but she would help if I needed help with things. Two women from Planned Parenthood in Dallas,
- who were both nurses and worked at the emergency ward of a big hospital in Dallas, and were
- all too aware of what happened when women who are just desperate not to be pregnant
- try to end their pregnancies. I mean, knitting needles pushed up inside themselves, douches
- with Drano. Truly awful things that women were doing to each other, and then they would
- be brought into the emergency ward, bleeding, et cetera. They came at it from that point
- of view, and they really were helpful, too, doing simple things like loaning me clothes,
- because at that point I was extremely poor, and I was a graduate student. They were helping
- me look like a presentable legislative assistant.
- The thing I did that I was most proud of there is I organized two hearings on abortion decriminalization,
- which -- because abortion was sort of a sensational thing, but extremely well-covered by the press,
- and because I had these contacts from the Birth Control Information Center, and from
- the nurses who were working in Dallas, we had just a really stunning panel of women
- come in and say what it meant to them for men or the law to be telling them that they
- couldn’t decide on this thing that most affected their lives. We had this one -- a
- woman who had had her first child at the age of 17, and whose husband was drafted to Vietnam,
- and had gotten pregnant right before he got drafted, and had absolutely no way of providing
- for two children, and had basically taken this giant book and just beaten herself bloody
- trying to induce an abortion, which she did successfully do. We had cases of women put
- metal objects up themselves, and had almost bled to death. We had women on welfare who
- were willing to say, “Look, I have five children, and I’m doing my very best to
- support them. It’s not your business, legislators of Texas, to tell me I have to have another
- child. It’s just not.”
- So we had this really -- that I organized and was extremely proud of, and organized
- one for the Congress and one for the Senate, these hearings, which were very, very well-covered,
- and kind of shocked a lot of people about what it looked like to be on the receiving
- end of this law that made abortion a felony. The main opposition to this, actually, was
- the Catholic Church, who was opposed to birth control altogether, and certainly opposed
- to abortion, and they argued the other side. But their argument was certainly not as compelling
- as women who were almost dying from back-alley abortions. One thing I learned later, which
- I’m proud of, from someone who talked to the bishop of -- I don’t know where the
- town (inaudible) is (inaudible). But they’d included Texas, and he said, “The forces
- wanting to legalize abortion are so well-organized and so numerous, we simply can’t win.”
- Which was amazing, because it was just me running myself ragged. There were not large
- numbers of us. It was a very small group who were basically fighting for their right to
- determine how they were going to live their lives as regard to when they had families.
- As a consequence of that, the Catholic Church leadership changed its position on abortion.
- They did not want to be in the position of supporting what the doctors probably wanted,
- which was abortion is legal if a woman has had incest committed against her or been raped
- or has a deformed child.
- They didn’t want that law, because, for them, it said that some potential -- that
- some individuals were more important than others. They wanted their position, all fetuses
- are equally human, they become human at conception, and we don’t want to say that it’s okay
- to kill one that was the offspring of rape as opposed to -- they didn’t want that.
- So what they did was simply back off, and they rather that it be completely decriminalized
- rather than support the so-called liberal bill that the doctors wanted. And that was
- great, from my point of view and from the women’s group point of view. We didn’t
- want what the doctors wanted, and the Catholic Church changing its position and not pushing
- -- just backing away from the whole issue was extremely helpful. Then, eventually Roe
- v. Wade came down, saying it was really a women’s right to choose, and it just left
- abortion, across the country, decriminalized. Now, I know that, subsequently, Texas has
- worked very hard to try to roll back all those gains and require consent of parent -- just
- one thing after another to take away that freedom. But from our point of view, we really
- won for women what we wanted to win, that they who would bear the children and raise
- the children got to decide when and if to become pregnant with those children. That,
- I thought, was a huge victory, and that was really accomplished by a very small group
- of very young women doing what came out of their hearts, because it affected their own
- lives and their ability to have lives, and the ability to go to college and their ability
- to get (inaudible). Okay, so that’s the end of that story. Do you have questions?
- Q: Yeah. After that, you went back and finished your degree, correct?
- A: I did go back to finish my degree. I did. I did eventually finish. But in the next -- after
- this, I took kind of a break. I had basically just done this around the clock. It sounds
- like -- it wasn’t just organizing these hearings, but it was the press release, you
- needed to do this, you needed to do that. It had been absolutely draining and exhausting,
- and so I took a break for probably six months before I jumped into the next thing I jumped
- into. But yes, after this, I absolutely did go back to graduate school.
- Q: Did your experience at all, jumping headfirst into the abortion issue, affect maybe your
- goals and what you wanted to do? A: No, not at all. It made it possible. As
- I said, I had had an abortion. Had I not been able to have that abortion, I would not have
- been able to finish graduate school. I would not have been able to have the career that
- I’ve had in biology. Things are better now, obviously, but they’re not really -- it’s
- not an equal playing field for women. We still don’t make what men make. We still go to
- work all day and come home and are sort of expected to carry way more than our share
- of what used to be everything that women did, all the household cooking, washing, groceries.
- All that stuff is still ours to do. And because there is no -- so rarely is there
- organized daycare at professional workplaces. It’s still very hard for women. If you look
- at the women who have succeeded greatly in biology, who won the Nobel Prizes, who have
- done the really breakthrough work, most of them do not have children. They can’t have
- children. Men can do that and have families, because the women do all the work. Women can’t,
- because there is not enough social support for their family that they can also do those
- things. So the really famous women scientists basically have had to opt not to have families.
- But at least they now have that option, whereas, in the early ’60s, they couldn’t even
- make that choice. For them, it was more important to do some truly transformative piece of work
- than to have a family. Or people who came to it for moral issues. People who feel the
- world has too many people, too many -- overpopulation is a huge problem, and they themselves do
- not want to contribute to this. There was no chance, except complete abstinence from
- having a relationship, to make that decision. So yeah, of course it affected -- it affected
- my -- Q: And have you ever made the decision to
- have children? A: I did not. I do not have children. I have
- children in my life that I love, but I do not have my own children. (inaudible) children.
- Q: Now -- yeah, I’d like to talk about your work with activism regarding Latin America.
- You had said that started because you had lived in lesser-developed areas and had seen
- how different they were from America. What did your activism look like in Latin American
- issues? A: I think this started in ’72. The little
- break after working as a legislative assistant -- another friend of mine, not Judy, but another
- woman friend, knew -- I think it was a Methodist initiative to understand -- a Methodist -- I’m
- pretty sure Methodist. It could have been Congregational, but I think Methodist-led
- initiative to understand why their missionaries were being -- meeting with a great deal of
- hostility in Latin America. What the problem was, and why they couldn’t make the in-roads
- they wanted to into Latin America. So they decided to fund a study group in four college
- towns -- Madison, Austin, Berkeley, and I think Cornell, I think. I may be wrong, but
- I think that was the fourth. They put -- I think it was 12,000 dollars into each one
- the first year -- it was a three-year project -- and then each year, the amount of money
- increased if something useful was happening there. One of -- (inaudible). There was a
- minister who had -- I don’t know what his interest in Latin America was, but he was
- the conduit for this money, and his intention had been to run some discussion groups and
- explore this topic and write up a report, and have the money kind of go into his salary.
- Connie Lanham, who knew about this initiative, brought together a small number of us who
- were interested in Latin American issues. The reason Austin was kind of important for
- Latin American studies is there was -- I can’t remember what exactly it was called, but it
- was called the Latin American School, but what became the LBJ School of International
- Affairs. There’s a Latin American component to that, that really trains CIA agents, trains
- State Department people, who are going to work in Latin America. There was a lot of
- expertise in Latin America, graduate students who studied Latin American studies, in Austin.
- Connie knew a few of these people -- students, young people, all -- and said, “Let’s
- go and participate in this study group, see what it’s about, participate in the (inaudible).”
- So we did. We took to heart what it was supposed to be about, which is figuring out why the
- missions were not well received in Latin America, and what on earth was going on in Latin America
- that created so much hostility to intervention by American Protestant churches, et cetera.
- We got more and more interested in this. Part of the backdrop, as I have mentioned, is the
- Vietnam War is going on during all of this time. This study group that we started brought
- this to the fore, that if the US was supporting this incredibly brutal, brutal dictatorship
- in Brazil, that tortured 30,000 people during the years it was in power -- the same in Argentina.
- There were about 30,000 people not tortured, but actually disappeared. There were just
- these incredible things going on in Latin America that the US was fully up to its eyeballs
- in, and we decided we needed to understand this, because certainly this had to be part
- of why American missionaries were not being welcomed, because the US was backing a lot
- of it. So I would say -- the first year was kind of participating in study, and then we
- got refunded. Out of that, there was a lot of -- again, a small group of people who cared
- about this issue. The group reform was called LAPAG, Latin American Policy Alternative Group.
- The people in it included Nancy Folbre, who became a professor of economics at UMass;
- Dave Davies, who was a cohost of Fresh Air with Terry Gross--
- Q: Oh, wow. A: Yeah, Dave was in there. We listen to his,
- occasionally, just wonderful political interviews. Connie Lanham, who became a union rep for
- the school districts in LA. Other people. Another woman whose name slips my mind, who’s
- a professor of Latin American literature at Santa Cruz. It was a small group of people.
- Nancy Folbre and I, who are both MacArthur Fellows. So a small group of people. I think
- at our largest number, we grew up to 15 people. And became -- we decided, after we started
- studying and working together, that this is something that -- we wanted to use this money,
- the 12,000 dollars that became 16,000 dollars and then I don’t know what it was in the
- third year -- that this was actual, real money that could be used for educating people about
- these issues. Not just ourselves. Because at this point we outnumbered the minister
- who I think had sort of hoped that it would just become part of his salary, we kind of
- took over this organization. In the next two years, we did the following sorts of things.
- We ran a film series on campus, bringing in films, many political films, from all around
- Latin America, including Cuba, which at that time was kind of a center for art and theater.
- We had a weekly radio -- we had the office, a little office. We had a weekly radio program
- that was on the UT -- what is it? Trying to remember what the --
- Q: It’s 91.7 today. KVRX? A: Is that the radio station that ends with
- something UT? Q: Oh, KUTX maybe?
- A: Probably KUTX. I’d have to look and -- I can figure it out. We had a weekly radio program,
- and what we had done in our office was to assemble the main, the leading newspapers,
- the New York Times equivalent for each of these various countries, and we chose opinion
- pieces out of those, which we used in our radio program. It was a half-an-hour radio
- program that was sort of a roundup of news of Latin America. Our mission, I would -- we
- did that. Also, once every quarter, we got a really distinguished speaker from Latin
- America to come, and had a big speaking event. We had totally remarkable people, because
- we sort of developed this profile of being opposed to US interventionism in Latin America.
- There were people who were fleeing torture, and the bishop of El Salvador -- really some
- incredible people came to and spoke, because we were there and gave them a forum and organized
- these sessions where they could speak to the US public.
- We did a film series, the radio program, we had the newspapers available to people who
- wanted to come and read. I’m trying to think, what was our other? These quarterly forums.
- We participated in all sorts of demonstrations. We were young and passionate and cared about
- all of this. People would come to town. For example, the finance minister of Brazil came.
- It was a big academic conference over at the LBJ School, where he was there. The Rostow
- brothers, who had been the engineers of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam were there. At
- this time, Brazil was torturing a simply enormous number of people. Any opposition to their
- regime were tortured. A lot of the torture techniques that were being used had almost
- certainly been taught to them from the Panama school, where the US ran a military training
- program for what became the dictators of Latin America, in Paraguay, in Argentina, and then
- in Chile, after the coup, and in Brazil. Because all the torture techniques they were using
- were the same.
- This is just a small, insignificant thing, but at the time, it mattered to me. It was
- this big conference where all of the big Kissinger-like figures were getting together to discuss what
- the US was doing here and there around the world, all of which looked, to us, to be just
- truly evil. I don’t think -- I think what we did in Vietnam is just reprehensible, and
- what we supported in Brazil and brought about in Chile was even worse, frankly, in terms
- of just attacking and killing, or outright torturing, members of the church, of student
- groups, doctors, labor leaders, intellectuals. All were targeted, only for opposing these
- really right-wing regimes. And because, as I said, we had this high-profile -- tiny,
- but high-profile group, student leaders would come to us, people who had been tortured.
- The student president of one of the main universities in Argentina. There were really wonderful,
- interesting, special people who came through that we got to know. So at this conference,
- one of the student leaders from -- I said Argentina, but I think he was from Brazil
- -- had been traveling around, trying to show people what all the torture positions that
- were being used in Brazil by the military against students were. He had these big, poster
- board-size pictures of them. We decided that while the various professors were sitting
- and having their meeting, we would set them all up in the lobby, and when they came out
- for coffee, there they would be.
- I was there, and I said, “Could I make an announcement right before the break?” I
- had, I knew, a very short period of time to say, look, for us, as academics, to be hosting
- people who are really the architects of the Vietnam War and the torture that was going
- on in Brazil, really need to think about what this means for the lives of ordinary people.
- It’s easy to say, well, if we get rid of all the labor unions and all of the progressive
- university students, army will rise. It’s one thing to say that, but you really need
- to face up to what that means in terms of the lives of people you killed to make that
- happen. Anyway, there was just a complete uproar, followed by -- I made this very short,
- succinct announcement. I thought I made the points I wanted, and invited them to look
- at the posters, think about what they would mean if their children were tortured and thrown
- out of airplanes and helicopters, et cetera. The finance minister of Brazil just went more
- or less berserk, tearing up the aisle, and he grabbed me by the throat and started wrangling
- me and saying, “You are so rude. How could you be so rude?” as if rudeness were an
- important issue compared to 30,000 deaths. Anyway, things like that.
- We were involved in demonstrations and continued legislation. We met and ate together once
- or twice a week, taking turns cooking, taking turns washing dishes. Kept up very much with
- what was going on around the world, and taught ourselves a lot of economics, which was help
- -- I was in biology, but I liked to try to get to the bottom of things. But a lot of
- our fellows in this group were in economics or Latin American studies, and had access
- to the best of the libraries, where things could be documented. So it was a really effective
- group, and really I will never forget the things I learned. It was a very effective
- study group. It ended after three years. I don’t know whether the church, the Methodist
- Church, felt that it had gotten to the bottom of why their missions were not welcomed in
- Latin America, but maybe -- we did write a report, and presumably they got that (inaudible)
- US foreign policy had been incredibly damaging to these countries developing. So, like that.
- Q: Did your study group ever get in trouble with the church organization for doing these
- things with the money? A: They decided, after three years, that this
- is not quite what they had in mind. They wanted -- as I said, we did up a report, this is
- what we’ve done. We had these educational programs. We think we’re following the mandate
- that you’ve written down. They said, basically, we were interested in -- how did they say
- it? We don’t really want to fix poverty; we just, as a church, want to kind of minister
- to it. We don’t really want to change things. We just -- I mean, I’m not a religious person,
- obviously. I’m sure they were upset when various bishops got shot and killed, because
- that would not sit well with their program, but I don’t think they really wanted to
- understand why the US was doing this. Why did the US want to break labor unions? Why
- -- so they didn’t want to fix the poverty. They just wanted to kind of minister to the
- poor. Do you understand what I mean? Q: Mm-hmm.
- A: So they discontinued that. Another thing we did get in trouble with is our radio program,
- where we -- what we were trying to do is -- we got sent out to 60 stations around the country,
- which was pretty good. I don’t know whether they were all played at 5:00 in the morning
- so nobody heard, but we felt we had some potential of reaching people. We did this during the
- buildup to the coup in Chile, where a democratically elected Socialist, extremely progressive government
- was overthrown by the military, with the US support and Kissinger’s support. Chile was
- probably the most advanced of all Latin American countries. It was sort of like the France
- of Latin America -- France and Germany. It had lots of newspapers. It was a really progressive
- country. It was not a little backwards place at all. To this day, here, at the University
- of Washington, one of my really good friends is an MD who -- the president who was overthrown
- by the US was an MD, and this person was a friend of his, and left during the Pinochet
- coup, which they had not expected to last a long time, but in fact was in power for,
- well, 20 years, almost 30 years -- no, 20 years. Word came down -- the person who introduced
- us started to make it harder and harder and harder for us. They wanted more and more conservative
- papers covered. It was a whole bunch of -- just one after another things that they wanted
- done differently, and we tried to oblige. (inaudible) hard to still get the message
- -- we were trying to explain to people what was going on in Chile, and why the US wanted
- to overthrow the regime, and then to document the overthrow, which happened on the third
- year of our having this radio program. We thought it was just this really powerful case
- study that people could learn from. At that time -- then, at some point, the host, or
- the kind of organizer at the radio station of our program, just leveled with us and he
- said, “You don’t need to jump through any more hoops, really. The word came down
- from the top, the head of public radio” -- who was a Republican at
- the time -- “just wants you guys off the air.” He basically said to us, “Any way
- you need to do it, do it. We don’t want this serious a critique of US foreign policy
- on the air.” So our radio program did get ended. But I learned a lot from all this.
- Like I said, out of this came a group of people who really learned a lot and went on to do
- some important things, I think. Q: Now, overall, during these years that you
- were politically active in Austin, were you ever invested in a single political party?
- A: Of our conventional party? Q: Mm-hmm.
- A: No, not. I mean, no. I was much more interested in kind of a systematic -- a systems analysis
- about why we were -- because we had Democrat -- I mean, Johnson, who we now know knew the
- war in Vietnam was terrible, we wouldn't win it, it was going to kill a lot of people,
- and it was pointless. We now know, because we have telephone records. He was a Democrat,
- who probably had the best legislative record of actually doing things that made our country
- better since FDR. I mean, the civil rights legislation, the -- I mean, a whole bunch
- of truly progressive things, but he was involved in this war, which really kind of wrecked
- his presidency. So he was a Democrat. Then there was Nixon, who continued -- who was
- a Republican, so it didn’t look like -- it looked like the problem was deeper than those
- two parties. Q: I just need to make sure -- I may need
- to delete something on this recorder to keep this going for another 15, 20 minutes or it
- will cut it off. A: I don’t actually have a whole lot -- those
- were really the stories I wanted to tell you, so we don’t actually need to go on much
- more. Q: Okay. Well --
- A: Unless you had a question. Q: Yeah, we’ll go ahead and finish up then.
- I guess just -- I was really wondering, looking backwards almost, what do you think was maybe
- the biggest impact you made, or even what do you think you did -- what was it that you
- did that made the biggest impact on you? A: Okay, so that was not the question I was
- expecting. To the world as a whole, to our country as a whole -- which is not what you
- asked -- I think Roe v. Wade was the most important thing, in terms of helping women
- make decisions about their lives. For me, I think the most important thing was to study
- this -- on trying to understand US foreign policy and what drives US economic interests,
- and coming to really understand the capitalist economy, which for me is the most important
- thing. And that really came out of the Latin American Policy Alternative Group, not -- just
- as part of that, trying to understand why we were involved in all of these just horrible
- foreign policy ventures, what was driving that, and US desire to control resources.
- It’s still going on today, resources, and keep wages low, maximize profits, and all
- the usual problems, and not let the people of the country control their own resources.
- So I learned a lot there, and I learned a lot about economics, and working with the
- people I worked with. I guess as a more general message, I learned that if you care about
- something, find a few people, smart people, friends, and jump right in and educate yourself.
- Talk, and talk, and eat together. Try to understand -- not just superficially. Just not what the
- surface news is, but really understand what is the motor, what is the engine, what is
- the driving force behind all of these. Why are we so insanely upset with socialism? It
- would make life better for working people. What really is going on here? Those are the
- three big ones. Something important for women’s autonomy, something very important for me
- to begin to understand economics and US foreign policy -- which I continue to be interested
- in, though I spend so much time doing my science work, I don’t concentrate on it like I used
- to. Q: And are you satisfied with where these
- issues are still at today? A: No, of course not. Of course not. I feel
- like -- Judy Smith, like me, got a PhD in biology. Went on and did political things
- all her life. She moved to Missoula. She just did a whole lot of really good political things,
- whereas I, after I left Austin, I was involved in anti-nuclear work, and I care really deeply
- about climate change issues, but it’s very hard to do research science -- I’m a full-time
- Research Professor at the University of Washington. It’s very hard to do that -- it’s more
- than a full-time job. It’s a job and a half, and it’s hard to do that and political stuff,
- too. But I look forward to finishing up here in a few months, and then work on other political
- issues. Because no, of course I’m not happy with where things are now. Are you kidding?
- Q: Hmm? A: I said, are you kidding? Happy with where
- things (inaudible). Q: They’ve come a lot, but I agree that
- I’m not quite satisfied either. A: (inaudible) and it’s particularly (inaudible).
- Q: I guess I was just wondering if you had any maybe last things that you think would
- be important to note down about your time working in Austin.
- A: Had the Vietnam War not been going on and I felt so terribly about probably three million
- Vietnamese and 55,000 Americans getting killed, for no reason at all, really -- except for
- that sort of weighing on us all the time, it would have been a really happy time, a
- really progressive time. It was wonderful to work with these people and to try to understand
- things deeply and try to change them. Reach out to students from other countries who were
- also fighting similar resistance. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. If it had not been
- for just the terrible sadness of this criminal war going on, which nobody -- it was like,
- during all of my graduate school days, that was our job, was ending that war, frankly.
- There were other wars going on, some of which we
- could do something about, and some we couldn’t, but that war was entirely of our making, and
- that was our responsibility to try and do something about it. It was a good time. It
- was a remarkable time. I’m glad I came of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Remarkable,
- remarkable time, and I am basically waiting for young people to rise up again and make
- the world a better place. Hope it’s coming soon.
- Q: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me, Dr. Foe. I really enjoyed it.
- A: All right, well, good luck. I will get your forms back to you. I haven’t actually
- sent them, but I will do that shortly, and good luck.
- Q: Okay, thank you. If I have any other questions, I will call you up, or maybe email you, getting
- spellings of a few names. But yeah, this was great.
- A: Okay. Q: Thank you so much.
- A: Okay. I hope you become a political activist of some sort.