They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  By six in the morning he was shaved, showered, and dressed, in civilian clothes as usual, white shirt, dark suit and tie, a cardinal red baseball cap covering his balding head, no gun, never a gun. He steered his gray unmarked Ford down to the campus cop shop at the corner of Mills and Spring, a dilapidated hut that housed his department, Hanson joked, “because they couldn’t find anything worse.” By eight he was meeting with his twenty officers and ten off-duty cops recruited from the city of Madison, going over the elaborate guidelines he had established for the two days of demonstrations. Since the protest leaders had telegraphed their plans, with an obstructive sit-in scheduled for the second day, this first day of peaceful picketing was viewed as a dress rehearsal of sorts.

  University of Wisconsin Campus

  The demonstration began at nine thirty at the front of Commerce with twenty “well-groomed picketers,” as the Capital Times described them, then grew to a hundred or so and “got progressively rowdier and gruffer.” The number of participants waxed and waned over the next several hours, with late arrivals and people leaving for class. They marched in the autumn sunlight, in a loose loop, chanting rhythmically, “Down with Dow! Down with Dow!” and holding handmade signs.

  “Dow’s Malignant, Cut It Out,” read one.

  “Who Would Make A Bomb for a Buck? Dow,” read another.

  And “Vietnam for the Vietnamese.”

  And “Let’s Get Out.”

  And “Stop the Bombing.”

  A few signs had no words, only pictures of napalm-ravaged Vietnamese civilians. One young man marched holding not a protest sign but his infant son. There was a table where students could sign up to ride the bus to Washington later in the week for the big national protest against the war. No effort was made to prevent students from going inside to be interviewed by Dow. Curly Hendershot, having arrived from the Ivy Inn with the precautionary ham sandwich in his briefcase, was never in danger of being trapped inside room 104, where the placement interviews were conducted.

  Shortly before a change of classes at eleven, a squad of picketers entered the front doors of Commerce, turned right, or west, in the east-west hallway, and marched halfway down the corridor until they reached room 104. They did not try to go in, nor did they sit down to obstruct entry, but rather circled quietly inside the narrow hallway. The six police officers who had been stationed inside watched nervously but, in keeping with Chief Hanson’s guidelines, did not interfere with the peaceful protest. With the change of classes the plaza outside Commerce filled with students. Most glanced at the protest and moved on, some paused to watch, some joined in, and others stopped to heckle. There was one minor scuffle, when a few football players “deliberately tore part of a rather long sign held by some of the picketers.”

  This caught the attention of protest leader Evan Stark, the entrancingly fluent orator of the movement, who came to the protest conservatively dressed in coat and tie. Stark approached Hanson, who had been monitoring the event from a ridge between Bascom and Commerce, and asked the chief to pull a few of his officers from inside the building to protect the larger group of protesters outside. Hanson knew Stark well from previous episodes, as did all the university officials, and especially Chancellor Sewell. Stark had studied in Sewell’s department, sociology, and had been in one of Sewell’s graduate seminars (which he stopped attending to organize a boycott of the local Sears). Sewell thought of Stark as “the genius behind the whole thing, the planner, the master strategist.” And while he never doubted the authenticity of Stark’s opposition to the Vietnam war, and agreed with him wholeheartedly on that issue, he also thought of him as “the kind of guy that takes advantage of any situation that he can to promote whatever aims he may have at the moment.” When Stark had left Madison earlier that year, the administration had hoped it was for good, only to learn that he had been accepted back for another year of graduate school. A bustle of letters between administrators and deans had accompanied word of his return. “I feel compelled to say,” lamented Dean Kauffman in one note about Stark, “that it is unfair to inflict on some of us the additional burdens of coping with disruptive and destructive behavior for which the admitting departments and the Graduate School accept no burden of responsibility.”

  But Stark was back, to be sure. He had come up to Bascom Hall to visit Sewell privately several times in the weeks before the protest, informing the chancellor that there was going to be trouble, that he would do everything he could to prevent it, but that the real problem was Joe Kauffman and the cops, who were conspiring to confront the demonstrators. Whatever reservations Sewell had about his dean of students, they were nothing compared to his skepticism about Evan Stark, of whom he once said, “I wouldn’t trust him any farther than I could throw him.” Stark had his own mixed feelings about Sewell. From a professional standpoint, he considered Sewell “one of the most decent men” in the sociology department, a scholar who made a serious attempt to address big issues but was a “second-rate methodologist.” In political terms he admired Sewell’s “instinctive pacifism” but thought he was overmatched as chancellor.

  Chief Hanson responded coyly at first to Stark’s plea for help, saying that Stark would have to be patient, that they “didn’t have a large army of police officers here.” When the break between classes ended, Hanson went inside Commerce, noticed that all was quiet, brought out two officers, and stationed them near the picketers.

  Shortly before noon the demonstrators gathered for an hour of speeches. The audience stood on the cement plaza outside Commerce, looking up at a collection of campus speakers on the ridge to the east who were angling for position in front of a bullhorn. Someone held a sign above their heads: From Protest to Resistance. More students stopped to listen, and the throng grew to about four hundred. Soglin, Bob Swacker, Rowen and McGovern, and the Stielstra twins were there, drawn not by the leaders but by the cause, determined to do what they could to end the war. Stark and Bob Cohen claimed their familiar posts among the self-designated speakers, along with their acolytes William Simons and Robert Weiland.

  Three poems were read in honor of the fallen Che Guevara. Up stepped sociology professor Maurice Zeitlin, a charismatic young socialist, his hair neatly trimmed, wearing a coat and tie and cool dark shades. It was Zeitlin who had presented the losing motion to the faculty senate the previous spring that attempted to ban corporations with military ties from recruiting on campus. With Stark at his side holding the bullhorn, and with his rhythms mimicking Bobby Kennedy, Zeitlin now said that “we live in a sad time, because it is a time in which as Americans the transparency of our government’s attempts to contain and to crush the aspirations for democracy and social revolution abroad have become so clear. That’s why we meet here. It is the United States government, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, which has intervened, interfered, toppled democratic governments, destroyed democratic and reform administrations and prevented their fulfillment.”

  Next came a few brief denunciations of Dow and napalm, followed by an existentialist rap from Cohen. “Now we have the corporate structure,” he said. “We have uni-processed students. You go work for them. You bring home your bacon. Nine to five every day. Pay the mortgage. Let yourself up. You’re a lawyer, doctor, teacher, what have you, and are now set to accept this society. What I’m saying is we’ve got to understand that society, we’ve got to analyze it, and indeed we’ve got to negate it. That society is keeping two-thirds of the people in the world in the Stone Age. It’s keeping us from relating to one another as human beings. It’s alienated us from ourselves. It’s gotten to the point where we can’t even think in terms of what this reality is. Where we can accept expressions like ‘clean bombs.’ How can a bomb be clean? Luxurious fallout shelters. Comfortable poverty. Escalation is peace. All the contradictions. They’re all contained right there within our language, right within the modes of our thought, and they just slip right past us. We think of things statically, not in process. We think in value
neutral terms. We don’t evaluate. We don’t criticize. The role of the intellectual should be critical. We are so dominated by these modes of thought, by this system, that we become totally receptive and we walk along like sheep.”

  And then Stark delivered what he later called “one of the best speeches of my short career as a student leader.” He even had a title for it: “Why the Wisconsin Football Team Is Losing.” The Badgers were losing football games week after week, Stark said, just like the peace movement seemed to be losing in its struggle to stop the war in Vietnam. “It might have to do with the same thing, the fact that we were all accepting the rules of the game as they were dictated to us. In the case of the football team, through mechanical means out on the field, in the case of students, through the mechanical rhetoric of our faculty.” The time had come, Stark argued, “to really burst this spectacle that had been created for us…. Everyone talks about the revolt of youth. Sociologists and psychologists study it. It is a spectacle like a football game or a movie. Soon there will be so much talk about the revolt of youth that people will forget to participate in it. We must stop looking at events as pictures on a wall and enter the arena of action to make the kind of history we want.” In his use of the word spectacle, Stark drew on a new vocabulary that was becoming popular in New Left intellectual circles. In France the cultural philosopher Guy Debord was just publishing The Society of the Spectacle, in which his first postulate was that “the whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”

  Assistant Dean Cipperly was in the crowd, looking around and occasionally listening. “Mr. Cohen and Mr. Stark spoke at great length regarding their personal philosophies related to the nature of present day American society,” he later wrote in a memo to Dean Kauffman. “Since I had heard both of them expound their maxims before, I must truthfully say that I did not pay particular attention to the specific contents of their statements.” Cipperly did perk up near the end, however, when Stark announced that the time of the Wednesday demonstration had been pushed back an hour from 9:30 to 10:30.

  People were handing out the latest anti-Dow leaflet during the speech, a sheet that was distributed not only outside Commerce but across the campus and all the way up State Street to the Capitol Square, where Republican State Senator Walter Chilsen had one stuffed in his palm as he strolled to lunch. It was a call to physical resistance that could serve as a time capsule of radical sensibility in the fall of 1967. The influence of feminists was not yet evident, as demonstrated by the use of the word men. Any signs that the antiwar movement had entered the mainstream meant not that it was on the verge of ultimate success but that it had sold out and was ineffective. And counterbalancing the anger was the dream of a revolutionary socialist ideal.

  Like other large corporations, Dow is a political institution. 75% of its business is with the military. [The statistic was exaggerated; Dow records indicated that 5 percent of its total sales were to the government.] Dow makes the napalm used in Vietnam. Recruiting for Dow is recruiting for the war. Being against the war is not enough. Last year 61% of the students on this campus indicated they opposed the war. National polls show more than 50% of the American public oppose the war. But opposition is not enough. Even on this campus, opposition has become ‘in.’ Not one faculty member in a hundred will defend the government. But the war effort has not even slowed down. Opposition must move against the forces which underlie the war…. On Wednesday morning, we will meet on Bascom Hill, enter a building in which Dow is recruiting and stop them. We will not beg the Administration or Faculty to do our work for us. Corporations do not disappear upon request. Neither will the war. If Dow is to be removed from this campus and if the war is to be ended, all of us must do it…. Let us break through the spectacle and become people who act!

  Stopping Dow will not end corporate imperialism. It is merely a first step in that direction. Like those fighting tyranny throughout the world, we must build as we resist…. To those who plead neutrality, we say there are no neutrals. We are not neutral. Not only do we oppose the war and the corporations that make it and the university that feeds it, we are also for a society in which men control their own products and in which men make themselves and are not designed by other men.

  Three in the afternoon brought a spectacle of another form, an absurdist scene that might have been scripted by Samuel Beckett. In room 105 of Commerce, next to where the Dow interviews had been taking place, twelve students from the ad hoc protest committee sat down with Chief Hanson and the task force of assistant deans, including Bunn, Clingan, and Cipperly. Hanson was under the impression that the meeting had been arranged by Evan Stark, since Stark had approached him earlier in the day and suggested it. Bob Swacker, who had served as the student intermediary for weeks, was there, along with Bob Cohen and William Simons, who had been the bearer of the bullhorn most of the morning, and a few students connected to the alternative newspaper Connections. But Stark was notably absent. The administrators wondered why the students had asked for the meeting. The students thought the university had called the meeting and wondered what the administrators wanted. Had Dow agreed to leave? Had someone told the cops to back away? Had the students decided not to force the issue? Could there be a compromise concerning the next day’s protest?

  These questions were not on the agenda. There was no agenda. It was not a case of miscommunication so much as no communication. “Bunn made a few friendly overtures,” as Connections reported later, and then there was silence. “Complete silence,” according to Chief Hanson. Silence for “approximately five minutes, but it seemed much longer.” Finally the students got up and left, having uttered not a solitary word.

  When his task force reported the strange nonevent to Dean Kauffman, there was some discussion about sending a delegation down to the Union again to try to find some of the students and determine what had happened. But Kauffman decided not to press the issue. Hanson, taking note of the communications breakdown and the forceful rhetoric in the noon speeches and leaflets, said he would need to bolster his police corps for the planned obstruction the next day. Kauffman agreed, and Hanson placed a call to Chief Emery downtown. He told the Madison chief that he wanted twenty off-duty officers, double the number he had used that first day, and suggested what Emery and officials at city hall already knew—that the rest of the police force should be ready just in case.

  INTO THIS UNSETTLED PLACE rumbled the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Having bought another cheap used car in Minneapolis, they drove down from the Twin Cities that afternoon in a three-vehicle caravan led by a blue-paneled truck carrying the stage, sets, equipment, and costumes. The performances at the Firehouse had gone well—packed houses, throatily supportive audiences that were in on all the inside jokes of this ribald Vietnamized version of L’Amant Militaire. Ron Davis, the troupe’s director, was feeling better than ever about his “rambling wild and talented” ensemble. On the theatrical side, he considered this the best commedia dell’arte his group had ever performed, with five first-rate actors out of the seven on stage. And on the political side, the traveling show was precisely the “stimulant” that he had hoped it would be. Free and easy, determined to raise hell and move on. “We are now outside agitators,” he wrote in one of his frequent notes to the troupe. “This is what we are supposed to be doing.”

  The atmosphere on the way down State Street to the Union reminded actor Peter Cohon, aka Peter Coyote, of “a crammed Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.” In Madison, he later wrote, describing that trip, “there was music in the air and revolution in the air. You could crash, get weed, meet great girls who would talk with you about books, music and politics, and sleep with you if they felt like it…. The student radical cafeteria, the Rathskeller, was full of old army jackets, long hair, beards, levis, and fur coats. It was dark, the food was bad, the crowd was intense.” All interesting, but not a p
lace to relax or prepare after a long day on the road, so the troupe escaped to the second-floor rear balcony, with its serene view of blue-green Lake Mendota and the surrounding canopy of elms and birches splashed by the autumn paint box in deep reds, oranges, and yellows. Then they made their way to the fifteen-hundred-seat Union theater and began setting up in preparation for that night’s performance.

  The rehearsal was interrupted once by the appearance of “a few curly-haired, old army jacketed kids,” as Coyote described them, who asked if the mime troupe might be so accommodating as to conclude the show with a general announcement from the stage about the demonstration against Dow Chemical the next morning.

  No problem, said Davis. Not only would they make the announcement, they might participate in the protest themselves.

  When the curtain rose at eight, the theater was full. Morris Edelson, the Quixote editor and campus impresario, moved around like an expectant father, whispering invitations to an after-party at his pad on Charter Street. Paul Soglin decided not to go. He reasoned that the next day would be hectic and he should take this time to study. Also he had an uneasy feeling about the outsiders, preferring to think that “local agitators could get the job done.” Jim Rowen and Susan McGovern were there. Rowen felt the electricity of the moment, a connection to the West Coast, to San Francisco, to the larger movement, a sense that right then, right there, was where it was happening. The atmosphere lifted the spirits of protest planners, who had trudged down Bascom Hill that afternoon in an anxious mood, fearful that the obstructive sit-in the next day would fizzle, with only a few dozen participants. This crowd, buzzing, pulsating, ready for action, gave them hope. Maybe they could burst the spectacle.