COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD
(rock musician, member of Country Joe and the Fish)
You had a thing called the “Super Trouper.” You had spotlights and you had gels on the stage. We wore clothes that we got in a secondhand store that didn’t match at all, and people used every fucking light they had and they projected liquids and slide shows and movies and everything. They had these posters that were all kinds of colors and lettering that you couldn’t read. Then on top of that, you combine psychedelic drugs. It was like going from a black-and-white movie to color. It was heaven. For a creative person like myself, it was just heaven.
There wasn’t any stopping it. I like metaphors. A long time ago, people ate their dinner with a knife and a spoon. Then, one day, some traveling salesman came through town with a fork and said, “Anybody want to buy a fork?” They said, “Why the hell do I want a fork?” “Just try it. Try eating your potatoes with a fork.” They’re all saying, “Oh my God. This thing really works good! It’s a lot easier to eat my dinner with a fork and a knife and a spoon.” That’s what happened in the sixties. The explosion happened.
* * *
*1 Behaviorism is an approach to psychology that studies the impact of environmental variables on controlling behavior.
*2 Ken Kesey, author of the novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), first took LSD in a CIA-funded study and became a proselytizer of the creative and spiritual benefits of hallucinogens. He was famous for hosting psychedelic parties called “acid tests” at his ranch in La Honda, south of San Francisco. In 1964 Kesey captained a brightly painted bus called “Further” (sometimes misspelled as “Furthur”) across the country with a group called the Merry Pranksters, who gave out LSD (which was legal until October 1966) to anyone willing to try it.
*3 Gerald Moore and Larry Schiller, “The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug That Got Out of Control: LSD,” Life, March 25, 1966.
*4 In 1964 Timothy Leary and his followers established a commune in Millbrook, New York, at the Hitchcock family estate, where they operated the Castalia Foundation, an organization whose purpose was “to disseminate scientific information resulting from research into states of consciousness…and the results obtaining from an alteration of the state of consciousness.”
*5 The Farm is a commune started in 1971 by Stephen Gaskin and 420 hippies who traveled across the country in a caravan from California to settle on land in Summertown, Tennessee, fifty miles south of Nashville.
*6 “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is considered a classic song about the psychedelic experience; the initials of the main words in the title are LSD, although John Lennon denied that that was intentional.
CHAPTER 3
MADISON
(1967–May 1969)
“The youth revolt means that our generation is creating its own mythology.”
—JERRY RUBIN, We Are Everywhere
Campus unrest started in the mid-sixties with resistance to parietals and demands for free speech and black studies. Then came antiwar teach-ins, sit-ins, and protests. Student activists targeted recruiters for Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm, recruiters for the CIA and the military, and on-campus ROTC. Sixty percent of large universities during the 1967–68 school year had recruiting protests, half of which resulted in violence. These early antiwar protests set the stage for the more cataclysmic campus protests that would take place during the school year of 1969–70. By the late 1960s, Rolling Stone described college campuses as the “great youth ghetto.” College enrollment increased by 37 percent in the fall of 1964 when the first year of post-World War II baby boom babies, born in 1946, reached the age of eighteen, and demographics played a role in the increasing power of college students to reshape the national agenda.
More so than Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Columbia, or Harvard, the most violent campus in the nation was the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What Wisconsin progressive movement leaders originally conceived of as a “laboratory for democracy” in the 1920s became a hotbed of radicalism in the 1960s.
KARL ARMSTRONG (University of Wisconsin student)
I grew up in Madison and enrolled in the University of Wisconsin in September of 1964. My father was a machinist and a member of the machinist union pretty much his whole life. I joined the Air Force ROTC because my father was in the Army Air Force in World War II. I didn’t really have any particular interest in it myself, but I checked it out because my father had been in it. At that time you wore your uniform on campus, which made me feel really uncomfortable, even though I didn’t have any reason to. There wasn’t a movement against the war on campus then, in 1964. But I just felt uncomfortable being around my fellow students in uniform. First of all, I didn’t think I’d earned the uniform. At that stage I was just political putty. I didn’t have any formed opinions. I was just basically living through the 1950s. I believed that we were the good guys, and they were the bad guys.
In October of 1967, I happened to be walking out of my econ class and demonstrators had occupied the Commerce building. They were protesting Dow Chemical recruiting on campus. Dow was one of the corporations supporting the war effort and it was particularly insidious because it manufactured napalm.*1 By the time I came out of class, students were milling around all over the hilltop outside the Commerce building. I thought, Well, I’ll just stick around and see what’s happening. When I saw Dane County sheriffs there, I said, “Well, there’s gonna be problems,” because I was from Madison and knew that these guys were real rednecks and basically supported the war. I knew there were going to be problems when I saw them start to amass outside.
PAUL SOGLIN (University of Wisconsin student activist)
In the 1960s, about one-third of the University of Wisconsin’s undergraduate class came from out of state, and half of its graduate students were from out of state. When you look at the other Big 10 colleges, schools like Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana have 3 or 4 percent out-of-state students. That raises the question: Why was Wisconsin different? You can blame it on Fighting Bob La Follette, Wisconsin’s progressive governor, who wanted to create a heterogeneous environment at the university back in the 1910s and 1920s. La Follette’s theory was if you bring in all these people from all over the country, you’re going to get the brightest minds. You’re going to build a creative environment, which is going to be populist and is going to do great things for the state of Wisconsin.
It was no secret in the late 1950s and 1960s that political movements were growing in Madison, whether it was SNCC or the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and eventually SDS. And it was no secret that Wisconsin had a disproportionate presence of out-of-state students, and Jews. Those New York Jews, and those out-of-state students, they do link up with descendants of the progressive movement here in Wisconsin. It takes a little while for this dynamic to work itself out, but by 1967–68, it’s in play.
Dow Chemical manufactured napalm. In 1967 we had a sit-in and we blocked the Dow recruiter’s office. The demonstration only involved about 250 to 300 students, at most. It started when the police moved in with their clubs. They did it a little after two o’clock, when classes were changing, so there were thousands of students moving across Bascom Hill. The students saw what was happening and they became angry. The police only made it worse by releasing tear gas. Before it was over, thousands of students were engaged, and the antiwar movement on campus just grew immense.
KARL ARMSTRONG
I saw the cops going into the Commerce building, and I could see from the outside that they were starting to hit people. I stuck around a little longer, and then they started pulling people out of the building. That’s when I saw my friend John Deverall, who lived in the same house that I did. He was a very intelligent guy from Ithaca, New York. I had a great deal of respect for this guy. I felt that he was a really centered sort of individual. When I saw him being hauled out of there, kind of like half-dragged and bloodied, I was shocked. He was being beaten
and I could see his glasses getting smashed on the ground. That had a huge effect on me: a fellow student, who I had a great deal of respect for, being beaten. We hadn’t even talked about the Vietnam War. It was a surprise to me that he was involved.
Credit 3.1
On October 18, 1967, students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison protested on-campus recruiting and the university’s research for Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm. Madison police responded with unexpected brutality, instantly radicalizing many students, including Karl Armstrong. This poster was printed by an underground paper in Madison.
I was really pissed. My friend was being beaten. Then the whole top of the hill was teargassed. That was basically the first time I had seen something that really enraged me. The battle lines were drawn.
RENA STEINZOR (University of Wisconsin student journalist)
For all the bravado of the students that made this movement, most of us started as high school kids from liberal households—I was from Westchester, New York—who showed up on this huge campus that was in total turmoil, and became radicalized by events, but were still very young, and quite vulnerable.
I often compare it to Yale, where the president, Kingman Brewster, was sympathetic and tried to manage the violence. He tried to reassure the kids, and was very parental. He was out there at the demonstrations talking to the students all the time. Our faculty was hiding in its offices. There were some very notable exceptions: Harvey Goldberg, William Appleman Williams, and George Mosse were particularly radical, but they were not active with the administration. The administration of the university was very hostile about the whole thing, and therefore it was left to the police and the students, with the help of a few critical faculty, to find their way. So it just became worse and worse.
PETER GREENBERG
(University of Wisconsin student journalist)
I walked into the paper The Daily Cardinal and said, “Hi, I would like to join the paper,” and they said, “Well, go and cover that ROTC riot,” because they had nobody else to do it. So I did, and I wrote the world’s worst story. But they ran it on the front page. This is a paper that every day has a circulation of twenty-eight thousand. And that was it. I was hooked. Within ten days we had the Dow Chemical protest. That was my first introduction to tear gas, and it was not pleasant. One hundred and sixty-five people went to the hospital that day. Once again, I ended up covering the story because everybody else was being beaten up. I saw Paul Soglin get arrested. They hauled everybody out of the Commerce building and beat the shit out of them with billy clubs. They weren’t just prodding; they really whacked them.
Credit 3.2
Police teargas students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Dow Day protest, October 18, 1967.
That’s when I said, “Okay, I’m not just covering a college campus for a student paper, I’m covering a war.” I realized that Madison had become a combat zone and I figured the best side for me to be on was to write about it.
TOM MCCARTHY
(Madison, Wisconsin, policeman)
I was a detective supervisor for the city of Madison police force, which had 293 cops. I was thirty-seven in 1967, when the Dow protests happened. At the big Dow demonstration, somebody threw a brick and it hit me in the face, broke my nose, and I lost four teeth. When I got hit they came and got me and put me on a stretcher and took me to the emergency room at the university hospital. Well, shit, there were sixty kids there with their heads shaved, getting ready to get stitched. I was on the stretcher and they found out I was a cop, so the kids came over and started spitting on me. The doctor came down and said, “Listen, we can’t treat you here. You’ve got to go to another hospital.” They had to come get me and take me to a different hospital. They got me out.
KARL ARMSTRONG
I was doing warehouse work in Madison the summer of 1968, but quit to go to the Democratic National Convention. I had campaigned for Eugene McCarthy going house to house. So I went to the convention basically to show my support for him, and my opposition to the war.*2
LEAFLET INVITING PEOPLE TO CHICAGO FOR AN “INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF YOUTH, MUSIC, AND THEATER”
A STATEMENT FROM YIP!
…Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth-seekers, peacock-freaks, poets, barricade-jumpers, dancers, lovers and artists!
It is summer. It is the last week in August, and the NATIONAL DEATH PARTY meets to bless Lyndon Johnson. We are there! There are 50,000 of us dancing in the streets, throbbing with amplifiers and harmony. We are making love in the parks….Everything will be free. Bring blankets, tents, draft-cards, body-paint, Mr. Leary’s Cow, food to share, music, eager skin, and happiness. The threats of LBJ, Mayor Daley, and J. Edgar Freako will not stop us. We are coming from all over the world!
Credit 3.3
Thousands of young antiwar protesters congregate in Chicago’s Lincoln Park during the Democratic National Convention in August 1968 to protest the Democratic Party’s endorsement of the Vietnam War.
KARL ARMSTRONG
I was in Grant Park on Sunday [August 25] listening to a concert, and I saw these undercover cops start fights, arrest people, and drag them off. They came in and basically broke up the concert—it was totally unprovoked. We weren’t doing anything except listening to the music. And that’s when I got my first taste of Chicago.
And from there, the demonstration started forming. I was really starting to get a sense that history was in the making, because you had the military helicopters flying overhead and snipers on the roofs of all the buildings. We started marching, I believe it was down Lake Shore Drive and then it came time to cross the bridge back to Michigan Avenue. On the bridge they had machine gun emplacements and all kinds of military. We had absolutely no idea what was going to happen. I just knew there was going to be big trouble.
We decided to walk past these machine gun emplacements and across the bridge. Then we marched down Michigan Avenue, and as we got to the Conrad Hilton Hotel, I could hear panes of glass from the front of the hotel being broken, and people were being pushed through the windows. It was just the most bizarre scene. I looked up and saw Hubert Humphrey waving outside from his window above.
Right there at that intersection, I thought, This is a really safe place to be, in the middle. But that’s where the cops ended up coming. The police started marching with their searchlights, up a side street. There was a wall of cops going back what seemed like a block. They came right through the middle of us, right to where I was. There were maybe a couple of people in front of me, so I said, “Sit down. Let yourself be arrested. Don’t resist, just sit down!” And so people in front of me started sitting down and we all sat right in front of the cops.
The first thing I saw was the cops grabbing this guy in front of me by the hair and they started clubbing him on the head, beating him. Then all hell broke loose. People got back up to their feet, and I felt really guilty for telling them to sit down. The cops were swinging their truncheons above my head and I was trying to get out of their way. I ended up climbing a wall on the other side of the street—I guess it was the railroad tracks—and I got out of the area. At one point I was down on my knees with my head near the pavement, trying to get low enough to avoid being hit. And it was with my face down on the asphalt that I realized, I’m never going to put myself in a position like this again. In my mind, I said, If they’re going to make war on us, I’m gonna make war on them.*3
Right after the convention, I got called up for the draft. I took a bus to the Selective Service office in Milwaukee, which was surrounded by antiwar demonstrators. I knew in my mind that if they selected me to go to Vietnam, I was going to go to Canada. I passed with flying colors, but they had this one question: “Do you ever sleepwalk?” And I said, “Yes.” I answered everything truthfully, because I wanted them to recruit me into the military, so that I could go to Canada—so that I could make my statement against the war.
Credit 3.4
Police and state
troopers roll a military tank onto Michigan Avenue in a prelude to the “Battle of Michigan Avenue,” when 22,500 law enforcement officers brutally beat protesters and journalists in what would later be described as a “police riot.”
They sent me to see a shrink, who asked me to describe what it was like when I sleepwalked. I described my basic disorientation, and the shrink said, “Well, we don’t want you.” That just blew me away. I said, “I can’t go to Canada, they don’t want me?” And I thought, Man, this really makes it difficult, because I knew that now I had to fight in the trenches here at home. The guys they were sending over to Vietnam were the guys I went to high school with. I knew they were just going to end up being cannon fodder, so I told myself, I really have to do something about this.
PAUL SOGLIN
It was the last weekend before finals, and a couple of students made some posters that said, “Why don’t we do it in the road? There’ll be a block party on Saturday.” When Saturday rolled around, people started gravitating to the 500 block of West Mifflin Street.
Witness to the Revolution Page 7
