They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  He was driven by an ideal—no stars in the ensemble, but each actor a total performer. Ronald Davis wanted the San Francisco Mime Troupe to be the best damn company in alternative theater no less than Clark Welch wanted his men of Delta to be the best damn company in Vietnam.

  Audiences who had never seen the mime troupe perform often assumed that they would be watching variations of the silent white-face routines made famous by Marcel Marceau. But this mime was something else entirely, an extremely verbal mode of acting that was also overtly physical and broadly comic. The signature method of the San Francisco Mime Troupe was to reconfigure old commedia dell’arte plays and stage them as modern farces laced with political commentary about racism, capitalism, authoritarianism, and the Vietnam war.

  The main play for the Midwest tour in October 1967 was a revision by Joan Holden of Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century melodrama L’Amant Militaire. In its barest outline the plot involved a Spanish army that was occupying Italy to protect Italians from their own rebellion. From that alone it was obvious how the material could be transformed into a tragicomic story of Vietnam. Davis played the role of Generale Jesús Maria José Álvaro Diego Garcia y Vega, an amalgam of MACV commander William C. Westmoreland and President Johnson, and Peter Cohon took the role of Pantalone, the greedy mayor of Spinachola, a sort of Nguyen Van Thieu character who profited from the war. Sandra Archer, regarded by critics as the best actor in the ensemble, played the dual role of maidservant and pope. Darryl Henriques, a comic talent who also later went to Hollywood, played both the servant Arlecchino (backflipping his way onstage) and the puppet Punch, who operated inside a cardboard box, offstage and apart from the script, a sarcastic commentator and cheerleader for the audience. The rest of the cast included the stock characters of farce, a beautiful daughter played by Marilyn Sydney, and three soldiers from the Spanish army: Alonso, a lieutenant played by Arthur Holden, Sergeant Brighelle, played by Charles Degelman, and Corporal Espada played by Kent Minault. It was a wild and talented cast playing around with a rollicking script.

  “You’re looking good, José, but what’s going on with the war?” Pantalone asks in the opening scene.

  “The tide of the war has definitely turned,” responds Generale Garcia, echoing some of the optimistic words of General Westmoreland that October. “Allied forces have seized the initiative. We now control most of the cities and towns, and our pacification teams are sweeping the countryside. The rebels are being rolled back, they’re scattered, they’re on the defensive, as is proved by the growing number of attacks.”

  The Vietnam analogy was obvious throughout the script, designed to draw whoops of recognition from antiwar audiences. Davis played the generale with a heavy Spanish accent, except for the end of one scene, where he rode off stage on a mock horse, wearing a Texas cowboy hat and mimicking LBJ’s Hill Country twang.

  “The government I work for is crazy,” Sergeant Brighelle says at one point. “Ten years we have been fighting in this stinking country, and we got to stay here till we win. Then we go fight in another stinking country. We could move now: there’s nothing left to steal, and Italian food makes us all sick. But without victory the generals get no satisfaction…. With the weapons we got now, they may finally get it. Blast you full of holes, melt your flesh off—pretty soon somebody’s going to get hurt.”

  When the puppet appears, the historical analogy often vanishes altogether and the story becomes the present and Vietnam. There is even a moment where the puppet leads the audience in shouting the familiar protest, “Hell no, we won’t go!”

  “Stupid clod,” the puppet says to the audience, referring to a perplexed soldier. “He didn’t have to go into the army. This is becoming a pro war play. Who put this on, the Voice of America? There are still a few ways out of the army, one is to psyche out. Shoot yourself full of methedrine, stay up for three nights and go down to your Draft Board, write with your left hand (if you can still see the paper), let them know you are a leading pervert…”

  Later, when Pantalone considers selling off his daughter in an effort to keep the Spanish military in Italy, the puppet confides in the audience again:

  “The thing to do is to hire the Generale and put him on your board of directors. General Dynamics has 52 ex-generals on its board of directors and they get over 2 billion a year from the government. Eisenhower warned the country about the Military and Industry having a complex, but JFK went right ahead with his New Frontier. JFK said, ‘Go West, Get More Land.’ So who do you think’s in Saigon? You’re right. General Westmoreland. Not bad for a puppet, huh?”

  Before leaving for the Midwest, Davis wrote an essay that appeared in Quixote, a radical alternative literary magazine in Madison run by Betsy and Morris Edelson, who sponsored his visit to Wisconsin. The object of the mime troupe, he said in that piece, was “to work at a presentation that talks to a community of people that expresses what you (as a community) all know but what no one is saying: thoughts, images, observations, discoveries that are not printed in newspapers nor made into movies: truth that may be shocking and honesty that is vulgar to the aesthete.” He also presented his rules for guerrilla theater, a term that his troupe coined: “Prepare to go out of business at any moment; prepare to give up your house, your theatre or your troupe, and even your ideas if something more essential comes along; travel light and keep in shape; Ideas like property cannot be private; nothing is sacred—only sometimes tenderness.”

  Most of the cast and crew drove from San Francisco to Minneapolis. Davis and Archer, his girlfriend, traveled by airplane. The director was thirty-four, but in order to get a half-price student fare ticket, he later acknowledged, he wrapped bandages around his head to cover his graying hair, put a stocking cap over the bandages, wrapped another fake wound on his left hand, and hobbled onto the plane as though he had been in a severe accident, with Archer nursing him aboard; playful deceit was an unwritten rule of guerrilla theater. Members of the cast had salaries of eighty dollars a week and lived off the land in the underground circuit. In Minneapolis they received five hundred dollars from the University of Minnesota and were put up by the Firehouse Theater. In Madison the Edelsons, both teaching assistants in the English department, arranged a five-hundred-dollar advance and promised Davis a percentage of the gate. It was a safe proposition since the ensemble had drawn a packed house at the fifteen-hundred-seat Memorial Union theater when the Edelsons had brought them to Madison for the first time the year before. Each cast member had a “complete list of names, addresses, and tel. numbers of the people who will provide accom” and were told to “arrange among yourselves and contact the people upon arrival.” (Davis and Archer would stay with the Edelsons at their first-floor pad on Charter Street, a few blocks from the Union.) They were also given the name and address of the local American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, just in case.

  THE FALL’S ANTIWAR DRAMA in Madison had already begun, though the guerrilla theater in this case was unrehearsed and it was not always clear who the actors would be.

  William Sewell, the new chancellor, took the stage reluctantly. He had wanted to concentrate exclusively on academic concerns, but that was a naïve hope. It would be impossible for him to ignore the challenges of student activists. The antiwar tensions that had been building the previous school year had not lessened, as some colleagues had predicted, but only increased. The formation of an Ad Hoc Committee to Protest Dow Chemical; Paul Soglin’s columns in the Cardinal predicting a blowup at the mid-October Dow demonstrations; the time-for-resistance rhetoric now common in the refrains of radical orators at the Memorial Union and on the Library Mall—all conspired to force the issue on Sewell from the moment he took over his new desk in Bascom Hall.

  In his first appearance before the faculty, on the afternoon of October 2, the question of student protest and how the chancellor would handle it was unavoidably the most anticipated and dissected aspect of his speech. What he said that day reflected his liberal sentiments as well as the c
onflicted feelings he struggled with in such contentious times. He began by saying that the outspokenness of today’s students, even that of the rabble-rousers so reviled inside the Capitol building on the other end of State Street, was part of Wisconsin’s time-honored tradition of sifting and winnowing. The students, he said, were “greatly concerned with what they perceive to be injustices and some are very active in mounting protests and demonstrations against them, both on the campus and in the larger community.” Great universities had always been places of “energetic contention and dispute,” he argued, and the disputatiousness so evident now only showed how seriously these students took ideas and issues. “Would we have it otherwise?”

  Then, gently, Sewell made the turn. “We have, however, held that support of causes must be by lawful means which do not disrupt the operations of the university, even as we are prepared to examine and to discuss with students the purposes of university operations which they question. My predecessor laid down general guidelines for the enforcement of this principle which this faculty accepted and I believe are fair to all. Until such time as the faculty acts to change these guidelines they will be followed. We will continue to protect the integrity of the university as an educational institution in an open, democratic society.” If it took the Madison police to ensure that protection, then, as Robben Fleming before him had promised, the university would call them in.

  With his position articulated, Sewell again tried to turn the matter over to Joe Kauffman, as he had planned all along. Let Joe handle it.

  The dean of student affairs began meeting daily with Ralph Hanson, the campus security chief, and several assistant deans, including Peter Bunn, Jack Cipperly, and Joel Skornicka. Discussing the policing issue, they decided that a group of off-duty Madison officers would be requested to supplement the campus force for the Dow demonstrations, with more on call if needed. All the officers, from both the university and city forces, would work under Hanson’s command and respond to different situations based on a detailed plan he was drafting. The group also prepared what was called an “abstract” of building guidelines, detailing in a friendly and conciliatory tone precisely what sort of protest behavior would be allowed in each of the various university buildings that might be targeted for demonstrations, almost in the manner of a formal invitation prescribing proper attire for a social event. In the Commerce Building, for instance, demonstrators would be permitted “in reasonable numbers” but would not be allowed to block classrooms or otherwise disrupt the classes. They could carry signs of paper or cloth inside, as long as they were not attached to sticks. And if any questions remained, “staff of the Graduate School of Business, together with representatives of Protection and Security and Student Affairs, will be available to consult with demonstration leaders on questions of procedure.”

  All of this sounded sensible enough, but who was listening? One frustration for Kauffman’s team was attempting to find an effective way to communicate with the anti-Dow activists, who operated in an ad hoc alliance that appeared leaderless or burdened with too many leaders. One student who seemed approachable was Robert Swacker, a senior history major who was Soglin’s cochair in the University Community Action party. Swacker’s rhetoric was to the left of Soglin’s (associates remembered him rhapsodizing about the Marxist government of Albania), but by temperament he was a moderate who believed in process and procedures, not freewheeling anarchy. As a high school student in Kenosha, an automobile town south of Milwaukee where American Motors made the Rambler, Swacker had served as chairman of Young Democrats for three years and had even led the First Congressional District Young Dems for LBJ in 1964 before heading up to Madison. During his first two years at the university, he had worked part-time as a Capitol page for a liberal Democratic assemblyman from Kenosha. Though the experience had left him disillusioned with mainstream politics, he knew how to operate within that world and how to deal with his elders. He developed friendly relationships with both Chief Hanson and Peter Bunn, the director of student organizations.

  When Hanson sought to find out what was going on with the students, he often went to the Union and tracked down Swacker, an early riser who could be found in his blue jeans and work shirt, long hair and goatee, reading the newspaper in the Rathskeller by seven every morning, hours before most other activists got there. For some measure of privacy, Hanson and Swacker would head back to the Paul Bunyan room, a less frequented meeting place in an obscure corner of the first floor. Swacker was not a police informant, he gave away no secrets and in fact rarely knew any, but he liked Hanson—as did most of the students—and enjoyed their exchanges, in which both men tried to figure out what the other side was intending. He had more formal meetings with Bunn, an earnest young assistant dean who wore a crew cut and preppie sport coats and was invariably direct and polite. Swacker first appeared at Bunn’s office inside the Memorial Union early on the afternoon of Monday, October 9. As Bunn later recorded in his log, Swacker requested and was granted a temporary permit for the Anti-Dow Coordinating Committee to hold a predemonstration strategy session in room 5208 of the Social Science Building that Friday night. For the next thirty to forty-five minutes Bunn and Swacker talked about the “activities and plans” of the anti-Dow group, but Swacker, Bunn wrote, “could make no representations to me concerning the exact nature of their planned activities since he was acting only as registrant and temporary chairman.”

  Swacker’s approaches to the administration were in fact barely tolerated by the more confrontational groups in the ad hoc coalition, who thought that asking the university for permission to do anything was a form of capitulation. He would “catch flak,” Swacker said later, from comrades who told him, “This is bullshit, the streets belong to the people.” But along with his sense that the demonstrators should at least get permits for their meetings, Swacker was also performing a bit of guerrilla theater himself, by vaguely misleading the authorities. “What this entailed was me constantly reassuring them that we wouldn’t do anything that would embarrass them or be illegal or get them in trouble with the legislature. We knew we would do all of those things, but we wanted to be able at least to meet without being arrested.”

  After Bunn’s first two meetings with Swacker, the administration realized that sending messages solely through him was not sufficient and that a stronger statement needed to be made apprising students of the consequences if they broke university rules. The warning was a matter of due notice, Joe Kauffman believed. In the aftermath of the first Dow protest the previous spring, they had even put it in writing. If potential violations of university rules were known in advance, they had declared, “protest groups will be advised of the rules which will apply and will be cautioned that they must take any disagreements which they may have with the rules through orderly channels.” There was no legal counsel’s office in the administration in 1967, but when Kauffman took the issue informally to leading professors at the law school, they reinforced his thinking. Don’t just go arresting people, they told him. Warn them first about what would constitute a violation of the law. Give them due warning and the opportunity to act accordingly.

  Who would issue the warning? Fleming had made all major pronouncements when he was chancellor, but Sewell was new, he was sympathetic to antiwar sentiment, and he was not eager to look like the hard guy so soon. Let Joe handle it. A bit of tension was developing between Kauffman and Sewell, the two quintessential liberals. Bill worried that Joe was burning out, Joe wondered whether Bill had the fortitude and savvy his job demanded, but at that point they were keeping their concerns to themselves. If Sewell did not want to issue the warning, Kauffman would do it. He would, as he said later, volunteer to make himself expendable as “the guy to run over if you were a revolutionary.” Kauffman drafted the statement, showed it to Sewell, who “approved every word,” then had it delivered to the Cardinal, which printed it October 11. What became known as the Kauffman statement, after reiterating university guidelines, ended with a clear warning
. “If any student obstructs scheduled placement interviews, or otherwise disrupts the operations of the University or organizations accorded the use of university facilities, the University will not hesitate to invoke university discipline, including disciplinary probation, suspension or expulsion whether or not arrests are made.”

  Although Kauffman described his statement as something issued for the benefit of the protestors—a fair warning—it was interpreted far differently by those to whom it was directed. When Paul Soglin read it in the Cardinal, he saw a free speech issue, a subject that had been of special interest to him since he had sent away for the HUAC transcripts when he was fourteen. This was not due notice, he thought, but prior restraint. He scrambled out to his red TR-3 and drove around the square to the near east side law office of a young black lawyer named Percy Julian. Julian was the lawyer for student demonstrators, one of the few attorneys in town who would take up their cause. There were two hip lawyers in town who counseled young men on how to avoid the draft, but Julian, with the help of Michael Reiter, an activist law school graduate who was doing doctoral work in philosophy, carried the legal load for almost everything else. Julian already represented Robert Cohen and the students arrested in the first Dow protest seven months earlier. He agreed with Soglin’s argument that Kauffman’s statement was not due warning but an attempt at prior restraint. The university, he said, was trying to intimidate protest leaders and find any excuse to kick them out of school.