They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Meetings of the student senate were sparsely attended at the same time that a faculty committee earnestly considered the issue of “student power,” something that student testifiers knew they lacked but could not necessarily define. The Anti-Military Ball, a counterculture tradition at Wisconsin, was held on the eve of the ROTC party and drew more students. They danced under the slogan “Anti-militarists have balls.” The Madison chapter of Students for a Democratic Society usually drew more people than the student senate and had its own newsletter, but the largest campus rally earlier that year was one in which moderate students gathered under the banner “We Want No Berkeley Here”—and the largest club on campus was not SDS or Young Democrats, but Young Republicans.

  Then there was the visage of Robert Cohen, a teaching assistant in philosophy who prided himself on looking like a beatnik. While Cohen was serving time behind bars at the Dane County jail on a disorderly conduct conviction stemming from an earlier protest, his scraggly black hair and beard had been buzz cut into oblivion by local barber Sam Fidele, who had volunteered his services for the occasion. Cohen complained that the sheriff had “this sexual thing” about beards and that his jailers failed “to comprehend the historical alternatives to their present non-qualitative existence.” The haircut, he said, stripped him of his “philosopher’s image.” The sheriff said it was for “health reasons.”

  All part of the atmosphere of Madison, Wisconsin, 142 miles northwest of Chicago, 77 miles west of Milwaukee, surrounded by the dairy farms of Dane County on some of the richest black soil in America, connected to the world and yet a place apart. Madison, nourished by four elements: the politics of its state capitol, the intellect of its university, the calm beauty of its lakes, and the grace of its American elm trees. All seemed permanent and immutable, but they were not, not even the trees, sixty thousand elms that formed exultant archways of green over the old city streets. It turned out that they were diseased and dying, more year by year, 937 that year, up from 763 the year before, on toward an awful slaughter that would wickedly mimic the worst devastation of north country timber barons by cutting hideous bare swaths through neighborhoods that once ached with leaves. The old elms were being killed by a fungus that clogged their circulatory systems, cutting off water and sugar. It was called Dutch elm disease, and arborists said it spread from the east.

  There were 5,385 freshmen at Wisconsin that fall out of a total enrollment of 33,000, and they represented—geographically, though not racially—by far the most diverse population of any public school in the Big Ten. More than 28 percent were from out of state, including 283 first-year students from New York alone. The Wisconsin Idea, conceived by leaders of the Progressive movement early in the twentieth century, was to use the UW as a “laboratory for democracy,” a resource of science, agriculture, social policy, and creativity available to the government as well as to every citizen in the state. The philosophy of the Wisconsin Idea was to reach out, rather than withdraw inward, and an unspoken but respected aspect of that was to reach beyond the state’s borders to reinvigorate the social and intellectual environment, a process that had been encouraged since Charles R. Van Hise (felicitously, a rock scientist from Rock County) presided over the campus from 1903 to 1918.

  A long-standing practice within that tradition was for Wisconsin to accept significant numbers of Jewish students, mostly from Chicago, Saint Louis, and the East Coast states of New York and New Jersey. For decades the student body was more diverse than the faculty, which had few Jewish professors until the early 1960s, by which time there were third-generation Jewish students following the same path their parents and grandparents had taken to the school in Madison that had welcomed them when much of the Ivy League had not. Michael Oberdorfer of Bethesda, Maryland, a graduate student in zoology and photo editor at the underground paper Connections, was part of that lineage. Oberdorfer’s father, mother, and stepfather had all gone to Wisconsin in the late thirties. Among the family keepsakes was a letter the father had written as a young man explaining that he was heading west to Wisconsin because he had been made to feel unwelcome at Harvard.

  But here was another crosscurrent: the steady infusion of students from other places, combined with the politics of the moment, had provoked a provincial response. In the aftermath of a series of antiwar demonstrations on campus, including a long but peaceful sit-in at the administration building in the spring of 1966 and a briefer occupation of the chancellor’s office the following spring—both led for the most part by out-of-state students—angry alumni and state legislators pushed for a tightening of nonresident admissions. The university responded with a plan to reduce the out-of-state maximum to one-quarter of the undergraduate enrollment within three years. The 1967 freshman class marked the beginning of that process; only a year earlier, a record 38.6 percent of the new students had come from outside Wisconsin.

  It was not a financial question. Any argument that Wisconsin taxpayers were subsidizing the outsiders collapsed under the weight of facts. The nonresident tuition of $1,101 per year, which might sound like a pittance to the ears of tuition-paying parents of later decades, was nonetheless $72.19 above the instructional cost per student, according to a report prepared for the board of regents. If there was a subsidy, it was going to students within state, who were charged only $350 a year to attend a first-class university. But for old schoolers like Arlie Mucks, the longtime director of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, a man who bled Badger red, there was grave concern that long-haired “outside agitators” were sullying the image of his beloved alma mater. When he expressed that fear to UW president Fred Harvey Harrington earlier in 1967, the historian turned administrator offered this reply: “Our image, Arlie, is that we are one of the great universities, high in quality, strong (very strong) in freedom of expression, a university at which we crush neither students nor faculty; a university that has had many out-of-state students since Van Hise’s day; a university that has always considered itself strong enough to tolerate some dissenters and non-conformists. This ‘image’ is a reflection of fact and tradition that long predates me. It is a tradition of which we are all very proud. We could hardly change the ‘image’ without changing the institution, could we?”

  The subtext of the debate, something that went unsaid in both Mucks’s complaint and Harrington’s response, was that a preponderance of radicals on campus seemed to be Jewish kids from the East. This was nothing new, no more so than the tension it occasionally engendered. Otto Festge, Madison’s liberal mayor in 1967, had an interesting perspective on that phenomenon. He had entered the university from a farm in rural Cross Plains during another political era, the late 1930s, and remembered a common sentiment then that “if the outsiders didn’t come here and stir things up, we wouldn’t have these problems; the good kids of Wisconsin wouldn’t do these things.” Among instate undergraduates in Festge’s day, many of German and Norwegian heritage, East Coast students were called “New York Indians” and the Memorial Union was known as the “Jewish emporium” because “that’s where they hung out.”

  The hostility toward student radicals, Jewish or not, had surfaced at Wisconsin a few years before Festge arrived. On the night of May 15, 1935, a pack of two hundred students, many of them athletes, decided to disrupt a meeting of a socialist club known as the Student League for Industrial Democracy. The twenty or so people at the gathering, as well as their guest speaker, a man named Monroe Sweetland, were swallowed up by the angry crowd and carried down to Lake Mendota. Three of the young socialists were thrown in the water before the mob action was stopped by a law professor. By then more than a thousand students had gathered at the scene. Many cheered as one of the leaders of the “W” Club posse declared: “Any meeting of radicals on the university campus in the future will be stopped. We won’t tolerate any reds in the university and we’ll break up every gathering.”

  What did the University of Wisconsin represent? Jane Brotman, after graduating from Columbia High in Maplewood, New
Jersey, leaned toward enrolling at the University of Maryland or Boston University but was told by her biology teacher and a patient of her father, a dentist, that she would be crazy to go anywhere but Wisconsin, which had also accepted her, and which they said was a wonderful place and a welcoming university. From another perspective, when Betty Menacher of Green Bay West announced that she wanted to go to school in Madison, her father, a lumber salesman, reacted with alarm, muttering that the campus in the state capital was little more than “a cesspool of queers.”

  ELIZABETH JOSEPHINE MENACHER had visited Madison twice before her college days, when the Green Bay West Wildcats made it to the state basketball tournament in the spring of her junior and senior years. The first time, she and six friends jammed into a Holiday Inn room on the northeast side of town and drove down to the university each day for the tournament at the ancient Field House next to Camp Randall Stadium. After the games they walked around the campus, and one sight from those meanderings remained etched in the young visitor’s mind. She saw “a female student with long curly hair wearing a colorful poncho, probably Mexican or Guatemalan, and with sandals that laced up to her knees.” The woman “looked totally cool and exotic,” and Menacher knew from that moment that she “wanted to go to school where people looked like that.” Wisconsin was the only school she applied to, despite her father’s vituperations.

  At the start of the summer between high school graduation and college, she traveled outside Wisconsin for the first time in her life, visiting relatives in Westwood, New Jersey. Several days a week she and a cousin ventured into New York City. They went to a concert in Central Park and then down to lower Manhattan, where Betty walked wide-eyed along the alien streets. “We ended up lost in Chinatown—in the rough part of it and we were also in part of Little Italy,” she wrote to her friend Mary Mahaney back in Green Bay. “All these tough looking gangs of boys were gathered around every street corner. There were empty liquor bottles and beer cans all over the streets. There were all these bums sleeping right on the sidewalk (we had to step over a couple). We even went by a house where whores were outside soliciting customers. It was stinky, but I thought it was cool!” Even more exotic were the bustling sidewalks of Greenwich Village. Betty was fascinated by “the hippie scene—the people, the clothes, the ear ring shops, the music played on the streets.” She had grown up in a place where everything seemed the same, every neat ranch house in her neighborhood, every attached garage and dinette, every outfit the girls wore to school, the short plaid skirts and matching tights and sweaters, Seventeen magazines, all the teenagers with their fake IDs going out to drink beer at the Prom Ballroom in DePere, every mother at home, no divorces, the unending if unspoken pressure to conform. There was something about Greenwich Village, like the poncho and high-laced sandals in Madison, that stirred her in a way she could not yet articulate.

  No sooner had she returned to Green Bay than her father announced that he had arranged a summer job for her as a waitress at the Alpine Resort in Egg Harbor, sixty miles to the north of Green Bay in Door County. She had hoped to spend that summer with friends partying at the Prom and felt that she would be missing out on the fun, but she dutifully obeyed her father. At the Alpine she roomed in a crowded cottage with twenty other young women. They waited tables at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then often hitchhiked five miles to the Parkway Bar and danced to Wilson Pickett songs. There was no privacy and the pay was meager. Betty netted thirty-three dollars for fifty-seven and a half hours in her first paycheck and averaged less than ten dollars a week in tips. The hard work for little reward was but one of many things she complained about in letters home to her mother—letters that were also read by her strict father, who reacted angrily. “As far as I’m concerned, you are unwelcome in this house and you don’t have to write back because I don’t want to hear from you,” he wrote to her in mid-August.

  She eventually adjusted to the resort scene by participating in minor acts of rebellion. Any waitress caught eating restaurant food was fined a dollar, a rule that became a challenge to be surmounted. “Lately everyone has been stealing food—like pies etc.,” she wrote to a friend. “Then we take them (this is during the meal) to the way back part of the annex in the dining room and hide them under chairs and as soon as the people leave we eat them. Today there were 14 of the 20 waitresses eating pieback there and the owner walked by. It was really funny because everyone jumped up and started cleaning, or setting up or swatting flies, etc. He didn’t know what was coming off, but he sure gave us a queer look.”

  After reading a story in Seventeen titled “Goodbye, Sweet Summer, Goodbye,” she told Mary Mahaney that the headline captured exactly how she felt during those waning August days in Door County as she lived out her last summer before college. The first brush of cool air in the northern pines brought an overwhelming sensation of things coming to an end. Two or three kids left the resort every day. “Another dishwasher quit. It was the one from Manitowoc who’s our age. He just left a note in the kitchen and left,” Betty reported on August 19. “Then yesterday our cutest bellhop was fired. The night before he was caught (at 3 A.M.) with Candi (waitress) in his room. She had nothing on, etc. He’s fired and she’s on strict probation. Scandal reigns at Alpine.” On August 29, the cottage’s lounge was “just packed with people” there to watch the final episode of David Janssen in The Fugitive. Six days later it was over at last, and she went home. Her father let her back in the house, and three days later it was off to Madison.

  Her parents drove her south and west down routes 45 and 151, her possessions packed in three pieces of blue Samsonite luggage that she had received as graduation presents, plus a new hatbox hair dryer and a manual typewriter. The clothes she took were mostly coordinated outfits (Villager and Lady Bug) with matching shoes. Moving day was nothing but a headache for Joseph Menacher, who was not particularly pleased to have his daughter in Madison in the first place and became even more annoyed sitting in the long line of cars waiting for a position at the loading dock of Sellery Hall. They finally unloaded, followed up with a mother-daughter shopping excursion, and then Betty, anxious to begin, nudged her parents out the door.

  Her roommate in room 273 Sellery was Barb Hoffman from Nicolet High in suburban Milwaukee, a school that sent so many students to Madison every year that they had a hard time avoiding each other. Across the hall were Gail Katz and Halle Goodrich from Cleveland, and down the floor lived flocks of freshmen from New York and New Jersey. Betty might have felt intimidated by the easterners had it not been for her summer trip to New York, but of course there still were stereotypes to overcome. One New Yorker asked her if she lived on a farm. No, she said, Green Bay was a city. To Betty’s shock, this person had never heard of Green Bay, home of the championship Packers. Even if she was not homesick, Betty could feel lonely, especially at mealtime; she usually tagged along with the Nicolet group until she had made friends of her own. At night the floormates smoked cigarettes, drank Tab, and had long discussions, at first about their families and high school boyfriends, but soon enough about sex and religion. Betty was Catholic but had stopped attending church and confession. She had birth control pills and a fake ID and no desire to feel guilty about her youthful adventures. As a beer drinker, if little else, she felt more experienced than the easterners, who came from states where the drinking age was twenty-one rather than Wisconsin’s more lenient eighteen. There was “a lot of throwing up” in the dorm’s common bathrooms in the hour after closing time. They usually went to the bars on State Street, especially the KK (Kollege Klub), but tried to avoid the Pub, with its long picture windows and all those frat boys sitting there on stools with their smug faces and beer stench and false machismo, ogling the girls passing by outside. Like many women, Betty began walking on the other side of the street just to avoid the Pub boys.

  The changing culture seeped into her life almost imperceptibly. She was still the naïve freshman, not the exotic woman in poncho and sandals. She was among the
freshmen women at Sellery who rushed to the window that autumn night when the boys congregated below clamoring for panties, and though she did not feel she had enough spares to throw any down, the evening was memorable enough for her to write about it in a letter to Mary Mahaney, who had enrolled at UW-Oshkosh. “Do you ever have panty raids? We had one Wed. and last night. They’re cool. About 500 guys all at once begin a stampede to Sellery. They stand RIGHT outside our window (we’ve got a terrific view and we’re only on 2nd floor) for about 2 hours—and chant and yell…” Her window faced Ogg Hall, she reported in another letter. “It’s really cool. There are a bunch of guys who put amps up to the windows and really blast out the music—at 3 a.m. Besides ordinary music, someone recorded jungle music and sounds (roars etc.) and—get this—they have a recording of someone heaving. It’s nauseating (but kind of funny if you’re not feeling sick or anything!)”