Near the front door police were able to grab a few demonstrators and drag them outside and up the knoll toward the waiting paddy wagon. One of the first to be arrested was Vicki Gabriner, Miss Sifting and Winnowing, who darted in front of the cops as they arrived at the entryway and went limp and started shouting at them as they hauled her away. Her arrest was pure guerrilla theater, and she made the most of it, resisting vociferously as two policemen dragged her by the arms, slowing them down enough so that every movement was captured on film. One of the defining pictures of the day was of Gabriner’s painted face staring out the back window of the paddy wagon.
Lynne Cheney, the English doctoral student who also taught freshman composition, and her husband, Dick Cheney, the political science graduate student, could not recall later precisely where they were as the Dow protest unfolded that day, but they retained a strong memory of seeing, and being revolted by, the antics of the mimes. In an interview with The New Yorker three and a half decades later, when her husband was vice president of the United States, Lynne Cheney said that she distinctly remembered “going to class and having to walk through people in whiteface, conducting guerrilla theater, often swinging animal entrails over their heads, as part of a protest against Dow Chemical.” What surprised her most, she said, “was that you would enter the classroom and here would be all these nice young people who honestly wanted to learn to write an essay. That, in a sense, was the real university, but this other was what was attracting so much attention.”
The breaking of the glass had “scared the hell” out of Officer Roehling, who was afraid that one of his fellow officers would be wounded by the shards. He also felt overmatched by the crowd, and he started swinging his nightstick with abandon. Roehling knew nothing about the proper way to use a baton in a hostile crowd, he would admit later. Madison police had not been trained in that yet, aside from four who had taken a brief riot control course in Chicago. What they should have done, and would be taught to do in later confrontations, was to keep their batons in front of them, using them two-handed to poke and jab and protect. Instead they lifted the clubs above their heads and started swinging. There was, Roehling recalled, “a lot of overhead swinging.”
Confrontation at UW Commerce Building
Eric Nathan, a junior from Manhattan, was in the surging mass just inside the front doors when the pushing and swinging began. He and his friend Donald Lipski had debated whether to take part in the demonstration at all, wondering about the worthiness of the linkage between Dow Chemical Company and Vietnam. Even during the march up the hill they had debated whether to be supportive pickets or obstructionists but finally decided to go inside and “take our stand.” They sat cross-legged in the corridor at first and experimented with interlocking their legs, before deciding that was too dangerous. Lipski felt “an adrenaline rush like pregame in a locker room” as the police approached. He and Nathan were part of the shoving match at the front door, with police trying to force their way in and students attempting to keep them out. When nightsticks went up, Nathan, feeling a sense of shock and outrage, decided that he did not want to “mess around” with the police. He raised his hands above his head in a “don’t hit me” gesture and managed to snake his way through the melee untouched, stumbling into the roiling crowd outside. John Lederer got out of harm’s way by rushing up to the stairwell, near Brandes and the gaggle of business student bystanders. He watched the melee near the entrance as police started swinging. “Some of the people were grabbing onto their clubs, mostly to keep them from being shoved in their stomach,” he reported. “They were pushing with their hands and the police officers would yank their clubs back to get them free of the hands, and the next thing they were hitting people and seemed to be very indiscriminately hitting people. They were definitely hitting people on the head.”
Some protesters were resisting the police, Lederer noted, and some were not. He counted himself among those not resisting. An officer stomped toward him and jabbed him in the stomach. Lederer put his hands to his head for protection. Don’t get clubbed, and don’t look like you’re resisting, he said to himself. He tried to walk out the double doors under his own power. Another policeman shoved him forward and he fell to the ground and was hit across the back of the neck. He got up and “was sort of half-shoved and half moved myself out of the building.” Stuart Brandes, from his position on the stairs, saw an opening through the foyer and vestibule and decided to make a run for it. He was afraid of being collared by the police, thinking that he might be “going out the door and right out to a paddy wagon and right out of school.” He made his way, shouting all the while that he was leaving as fast as he could, and though he was jostled, he managed to avoid the nightsticks. Brandes reached the second set of glass doors and stepped out to the plaza and saw a ring of officers in front of him and the swirling crowd behind them. He decided to turn sharply to the left, following the side of the building a few yards until he looked down and faced a sudden ten-foot drop-off.
Below him cut into the earth was a cement walkway leading to a basement utility room, and standing down there looking up at him, urging him not to jump, was Maurice Zeitlin, the assistant professor of sociology. Zeitlin did not support the obstructive protest and had not participated in the demonstration but felt connected to the demonstrators. He had sponsored the faculty resolution the previous spring that had sought to ban Dow and other military contractors from recruiting on campus, and only the day before he had been a featured speaker at the noontime rally on the Commerce plaza against Dow. Shortly before the confrontation now, he had attempted, with no luck, to persuade the police not to enter Commerce. When all else failed, he noticed the dangerous precipice to the side of the front doors and decided to station himself down at the bottom, thinking that he might catch anyone who jumped or fell.
Within a few minutes the first wall of protesters inside had vanished. Police had gained control of the foyer and started to move down the east-west corridor toward the obstructionist students in front of the Dow interview room. It was “kind of close quarters” in the hallway, Sergeant Buss later recalled, and protesters “laid on the floor, kicked at you, spat at you, cursed you—but it wasn’t the violent type where we met the swinging fists and trying to choke you and so on.” Buss said he and his fellow officers “did manage to use” their clubs “and a couple of students were knocked to the floor and we then started taking them by the arms or any way we could get them. We kind of broke their resistance and started…pushing them back through the door and there were enough policemen so that one guy would get hold of him, the next guy would take him, the next guy, and out the door they would go, so finally we just had them out of the way.”
Captain George Schiro, in charge of the fourteen Madison and campus officers who had been stationed inside the building all morning, started moving away from room 104, where the Dow interviews were supposed to have taken place. Curly Hendershot had given up any pretense of conducting interviews by then and had retreated through an interior doorway into the business school’s administrative office, where a few secretaries and faculty members remained. Schiro edged down the hallway with his back pressed against the wall, as soon as he heard the commotion at the front. As he neared the foyer, he started grabbing students, trying to eject them. He was without a nightstick himself, but he saw the other officers wielding their batons. It was only in self-defense, he thought. Bob Hartwig, a sergeant in Hanson’s university force, had been standing near Schiro outside the Dow interview room when the police wedge entered the building and the glass started breaking, “sending a jolt through everybody.” He tried to usher students out the far western stairwell, but many would not, or could not, leave. Utter chaos, he thought.
Jim Rowen and Susan McGovern, two-thirds of the way down the corridor, could see and hear the commotion at the other end. It was an eerie phenomenon, Rowen recalled, all noise and light moving their way, the screams of students and the lights of television cameras. And on top of this a so
und Rowen had never heard before, one that he could not immediately place. Then, perhaps ten seconds later, he realized what it was—“the sound of people having their heads hit. It was like a basketball bouncing on the floor. Or hitting a watermelon with a baseball bat. It makes a sort of thunk.” It all became clear to Rowen at that moment. “Civil disobedience wasn’t working on our terms. They weren’t arresting people, they were beating people. That’s how they were clearing the hallway. Just going through like a machine and beating people.” Tom Beckmann, a business student from Whitefish Bay, was taking a pop quiz at that moment in a classroom one floor above the melee. The door to the room was closed, but still Beckmann and his classmates could hear it all. “We could hear kids being hit on the head with nightsticks. It was gut-wrenching. It sounded like somebody taking a two-by-four and slamming it on a table.”
From his place amid the students halfway down the hallway, Jack Cipperly, the assistant dean of students, saw police helmets bobbing above the heads of the crowd and “nightsticks rising and falling, rising and falling.” He heard “a series of cries emanate from the group” and tried to move forward toward the police to warn them that they were approaching an area occupied by many young women protesters. Cipperly pleaded with the first officers to refrain from using their clubs. “At this point it must be explained that a certain amount of hysteria and panic was apparent within the group,” he reported later. “In many cases the officers and the students appeared to be acting independently. Several curses were reciprocally exchanged between the police and the demonstrators…. In my direct observation I witnessed many policemen who pulled students to their feet without using their nightsticks; at the same time, I witnessed individual policemen who struck students who were on the ground.” Some cops were restrained, Cipperly said, but some were not. When he saw one officer wind up as though he were going to strike a young woman, Cipperly “grabbed him, like hockey players do.” It turned out to be Jerry Gritsmacher, with whom Cipperly had gone to Catholic grade school and high school.
“Jerry, what are you doing?” Cipperly asked.
“Jack, what are you doing?” the officer responded.
As people in the hallway retreated, Michael Oberdorfer, who had been sitting outside the interview room, moved forward. He heard a woman screaming “Stop! Stop! I’m hurt! I’m hurt!” and moved toward the screams, finally reaching a young woman who was bent over, clutching her knees, sobbing. She had been clubbed in the abdomen and uterus. Oberdorfer picked her up and carried her toward the foyer and the front entrance. He was enraged, acting on reflex, shouting madly as he moved through a phalanx of police clubs. What the hell’s wrong with you guys! Can’t you see I’m trying to help someone who’s hurt! He brought the young woman out the double doors, swinging his elbows furiously as he went, knocking an officer to the ground.
Paul Soglin and Jonathan Stielstra had been in the line of protesters standing not far from Cipperly, outside the Dow interview room. Suddenly the crowd in front of them disappeared and there was nothing between them and the bull-rushing police. Soglin saw five officers coming toward him. He and Stielstra and the others started backpedaling very slowly, trying not to start a stampede, shouting at the police as they retreated. Soglin pulled the collar of his sheepskin coat over his neck and the back of his head. Then, as he later described the moment, “they just came right at me. It was almost like, ‘We’ll get that one next.’ And they grabbed me and started beating me, and I ended up right on the floor. I don’t know how long it lasted…. But I know I was holding my own and they were getting frustrated. Because the jacket was doing its job. The jacket was doing its job in protecting my head and my back pretty much. One of them hit me right on the base of the spine. I was on my side, and instinctively my arms went out and my legs went out, my limbs just shot out. And at that point everything was exposed. And then they started working on my legs and my head.”
The students behind Soglin were scrambling. After watching the police go through the demonstrators “like a hot knife through butter,” Billy Kaplan, the junior from Wilmette, decided that he would save himself from that fate. He heard people “crying and screaming, and it was real crazy, real chaotic,” he recalled. He had “never seen police beat anybody at that point except on newsreels from down South, beating blacks. And it had all happened so fast.” As he remembered it, “all of a sudden the doors just blew open and there was this big noise and people were falling down left and right, and you could see these big things coming down on people, and I got the shit scared out of me. I was really frightened. And I ran. I just ran. And having just been near the bathroom, I went inside. There were maybe a half dozen of us.” A policeman followed Kaplan into the bathroom. He thought he and the others would “be beaten to within an inch of our lives.” And what a way, what a place to get beaten, he thought, “in a damn bathroom.” But the officer did not touch them. “Out! Out! Get your asses out!” he yelled, pushing them back into the hallway.
Rowen and McGovern, who had been positioned a few yards behind Soglin, were trying to escape toward the stairwell at the western end of the corridor but found their way blocked. Rowen turned around in time to see Soglin being beaten. Less than a decade later the two would run the city of Madison together, Soglin as mayor and Rowen as his chief of staff, but at the time they barely knew each other. Rowen recognized Soglin by “his hair and his jacket. The trademark jacket with sheepskin lining.” The image that would stick in his mind was of Soglin “in a ball, a little fetal position ball. And a cop beating him on his back and making this tremendous sort of whacking sound.”
Finally, as Soglin recounted, “one of the officers said, ‘Have you had enough?’—as though it had been asked several times before. And they picked me up and threw me forward, and I am now on my own, on my feet. And they are moving on to whoever is behind me. And they are now escorting me out. Sort of like running the gauntlet, because there are more officers. And they had no real further interest in me except getting me out of the building, which was a surprise.” Soglin made his way to the foyer and through the vestibule, past the broken glass, out to the plaza. “And there is a mammoth crowd out there. And I come out and another officer just kind of throws me by the collar beyond the ring of officers into the crowd.” Swacker and Stielstra were right behind him. Swacker made it through untouched. Stielstra had been whacked a few times on the way out, but was able to remain standing and avoid serious blows. “I probably covered my head,” he recounted later. “Or maybe they just thought, ‘This guy doesn’t look robust enough, let’s not hurt him too bad.’”
The scene in the north-south hallway, where the nonobstructive supportive picketers were gathered, was much the same. John Pickart and Everett Goodwin watched the approaching wedge of officers with disbelief. Pickart was standing on a chair outside the door to Krasny’s classroom. He saw “a Quaker girl” with whom he had argued philosophy just moments earlier, “still sitting there and getting hit so hard by a police nightstick.” And “a boy lying across a girl and obviously just trying to shield her, getting kicked and struck by two policemen.” Much as in the scene in the east-west corridor, students who wanted to escape found themselves trapped: police coming at them from one direction, an immobile jam of people behind them in the other direction.
Betty Menacher was in the north-south hallway when the police charge began. She had heard the ruckus outside her classroom and opened the door, which locked behind her. Soon the crowd was backing up in her direction.
A woman pushed her against the wall and said, “What’s wrong with you? You’re not ready at all. Pull your hair back and take your earrings off!” Then the corridor resounded with shouts and shrieks and it seemed to Menacher that “an army was coming down the hallway.” She watched as two policemen grabbed a young woman by her long blond hair and yanked her down the hall. Then she saw “a policeman hit a kid over the head and the blood just gushed out.” It was time to flee, Menacher thought. She started moving backwards down the
hallway, trying to enter each classroom door she passed. Finally she banged on a door and heard voices inside. A woman opened the door just as a policeman grabbed one of Menacher’s arms.
“You fucking pig, let go!” the woman inside screamed at the officer. A young man came up and grabbed Menacher’s other arm. The officer let go and shoved Menacher into the room. Pickart made it into the room as well, and they all climbed out the window and ran toward the front of Commerce. Krasny and his handful of freshmen students joined them out the window. On the way toward the plaza Pickart saw several students running by, covered with blood. “Those damn bastards can’t do this to us,” one girl screamed.
In the heat of the confontration, cops versus students, individual human beings tended to be seen only as representatives of a type, and the intense hatred of one type for the other now was overwhelming. But John Pickart felt conflicting emotions. He was furious about the police attack, by their use of nightsticks, by the fact that the administration had allowed the confrontation to take place, yet he was also disturbed by the mass psychology of the angry crowd. “In the general confusion I made my way to a point where I could get a fairly good view of the front doorway,” he reported in a letter he wrote later that night to Pam Crane, a high school friend who attended Oberlin College. “It was a terrible sight…. Then the students by the door started spitting on the police and screaming at them. The policemen charged with their clubs. I left again. This time for good. I couldn’t stand to see 2,000 people acting like animals. I still can’t believe it, in my home town! On my university! It was terrible. I have never seen such hysteria and hatred in so large a group of people. On my way out, I looked back to see the whole crowd screaming ‘Dirty Fascist Honky’ at the police.”
They Marched Into Sunlight Page 47
