Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK by Matthew C. Ehrlich

Author:Matthew C. Ehrlich
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252053153
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Junior Revilo Oliver

Despite this bizarre and tragic family history, Revilo and Flora’s son—who also was named Revilo—would in time make himself a respected professor of the classics. The young man showed early in his life that he had unusual talents. After attending Springfield public schools, Oliver left for southern California while he was still an adolescent, ostensibly to remove himself from Illinois winters (although one wonders whether the ongoing turmoil at home also might have been a factor). He took classes at Compton High School in the Los Angeles area. “The ‘educators’ there had already made great progress in sabotaging education,” Oliver would recall contemptuously, “so, just to have something to occupy my mind, I began the study of Sanskrit.” To that end, he obtained a Hindu tutor who he believed “had come to the United States to ease the financial burdens of dowagers who had more money than they could otherwise spend.” Oliver soon became proficient in multiple languages, including Latin and Greek, and for recreation he journeyed “to watch the holy men and holier females [including Aimee Semple McPherson] pitch the woo at the simple-minded.” He spent a brief stint at Pomona College in California, and by 1927 he had returned home to live with his parents. Oliver subsequently enrolled at the U of I.6

“He was unlike any student we had ever known,” remembered a U of I undergraduate who lived in the same dormitory as Oliver. “He was like a character out of a Charles Dickens novel”: tall, sallow, always dressed in the same brown suit whose sleeves and legs were much too short for him, and prone to charge straight ahead across campus, with nary a glance to the left or right. The young man seemed utterly credulous and hence was easy prey for practical jokes, such as repeatedly being told that a nonexistent telegram was waiting for him at a distant office. Then there were the notebooks that Oliver amassed on ancient tongues. “They were filled with immaculate typing done on a typewriter which had a keyboard with special Greek and Sanskrit alphabets,” his dormitory mate recalled. “He was one of the most brilliant students to pass through the university.” He was also obviously different from everyone else, having not been raised as his classmates had been “with fishing and swimming and lusty games and fistfights.” And although in those days Oliver held an unswerving devotion to Abraham Lincoln—even letting his long dark hair fall across his forehead, as his idol had done—he seemed the type of person whose passions could escalate “into a strong prejudice or fanaticism.”7

In 1930, one year after his father’s suicide, Oliver married Grace Needham in Urbana; she was several years older than he and had two daughters from a previous marriage. Grace would become her new husband’s fiercest champion. She was active in local theater, and in May 1935 the Illini Theater Guild mounted a production of the ancient play The Little Clay Cart in a new translation by Oliver from the original Sanskrit.

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