Stark was back in Kauffman’s office, where he spoke directly to the chancellor. Here was a final offer, he said. If Sewell signed a statement directing Dow to leave the UW campus and never return, they would try to get the obstructive sit-in to end.
No deal, Sewell responded. It was his duty to enforce university regulations. He would not capitulate to an illegal action. The student leaders had no right to tell him what to do. If Bob Cohen and Evan Stark and their associates could dictate to him, he thought, that would be the end of his administration anyway. “You guys better get out of that building,” Sewell told them, “because people are going to come in and get you out if you don’t.”
As Stark left, he warned of a possible “bloodbath.” Only the administration could prevent it, he said. On the way out he walked by Chief Emery, who was coming in.
This was now a police matter, Sewell told the two chiefs after Emery joined the meeting. From Bascom’s rear window, they could see the hive of students around the front door of Commerce. Hanson turned to Emery and asked, “Do we have enough troops, do you think, to get them out?”
Chapter 22
Moments of Decision
IT WAS TEN AFTER ONE and Miss Sifting and Winnowing pranced on the edge of the crowd, teasing cops under the Carillon Tower and entertaining curious students who gaped nearby. There was something about assuming this alternative persona in costume and mime face that made Vicki Gabriner feel bold and uninhibited. Fraternity boys and policemen in riot gear were people she usually avoided, but now she tried to engage them in her extemporaneous show. “Glad to see you’re supporting us, boys!” she sang out to Richard Swearingen, a sophomore from Milwaukee, among a group of hallmates from Tripp Hall who had stopped briefly on the way to class. Swearingen and friends had no interest in joining the protest, but it was hard to walk by without melding into the audience for a minute or two. Though few bystanders could see what was going on inside Commerce, the performance on the plaza was curious enough, with local and visiting mimes doing their thing. Ronnie Davis, ever the director, had instructed his San Francisco ensemble to be provocative without getting “trapped in the action” or arrested. They had “other colleges to stir up,” he said, and could not afford to be delayed in Madison. As for himself, Davis had errands to run; he now headed down the hill to the university library, intent on stealing The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
William Bablitch, a third-year law student from Stevens Point, was just then returning to the front of Commerce after taking an hour’s leave to attend Evidence class. The crowd, he noticed, had greatly increased in number and intensity since he was last there. Decades later Bablitch would serve as a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a position reflecting a propensity to mediate that he satisfied at this early age by serving as self-designated neutral observer at the demonstration. He nudged his way in Commerce’s front entrance but “could proceed no further than about five feet inside the door because people inside were packed, standing like sardines, and there was no room to move.” He went out again and headed left down the sloping sidewalk to the far west entrance. After reaching the main floor east-west corridor from that end, he worked his way down the jammed hallway to a room with open windows overlooking the front of the building. Taking in the sights and sounds, the determined crowd inside, the police formation under the Carillon Tower across the street, the swirl of antiwar protesters and bystanders on the plaza, Bablitch made the observation that this was “quite obviously a stalemate.” If the “police did not move, the students obviously were not going to move.” They were not going to attack the police. “If nobody does anything stupid, the status quo is going to remain,” he reasoned. “These students will get hungry some time and will go home.”
Some students even now, two hours into the demonstration, with everything bubbling around them, were focused not on the protest but on getting to class, even a class on the main floor of Commerce. Betty Menacher, the freshman from Green Bay, took basic English composition there twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays at 1:20, and she had not missed a class since the fall term began. As she rounded Bascom Hall and walked down toward Commerce, she noticed students carrying signs and chanting slogans about napalm and Dow. She still did not know what napalm was or how it was used in Vietnam. Her reaction to the protesters was not as instinctively negative as that of her fellow freshman, Jane Brotman of New Jersey, who was standing in the crowd outside. Menacher considered herself mildly intrigued but politically uninformed and certainly not ready to participate, but nor did she want to cross a picket line. She circled the building once and finally came in through an entrance on the rear or south side. Her classroom was on the main floor’s north-south corridor, with street-level windows facing east toward Bascom Hall. This corridor was a secondary hallway in the protest, away from the Dow interview room, but by the time Menacher got there, it was teeming with supportive picketers and observers who could see directly down to the main entrance.
Only a handful of students were in the classroom when Menacher arrived, among them Jerilyn Goodman, a sprightly seventeen-year-old freshman from Springfield, New Jersey, who had pushed her way through the crowd without stopping to talk to anyone. The hallway scene, like much of what she saw during her first few weeks on campus, was wholly alien to her. Goodman was not into politics, nor into sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Her intentions, as she later described them, were to “go to class, make my parents happy, get good grades, and do what I was supposed to do.” What she was supposed to do now was be in freshman comp, so she climbed over people to get into the room. But shortly after arriving, she determined that class would not be held. She had no interest in what was occurring outside the door or how it would be resolved, so she climbed out the window, circumnavigated the crowd between Commerce and Bascom Hall, and walked down to the Union to study for an hour before her 2:25 French class.
Soon after Goodman slipped out the window, her teacher, Michael Krasny, arrived in the classroom. Krasny, an English department graduate student, had been straddling different worlds since his arrival in Madison that fall. He came to Wisconsin from Ohio University already opposed to the war and quickly immersed himself in the movement culture, hanging out at the familiar haunts, Ella’s Deli on State, the Plaza Tavern on North Henry, and the Union Rathskeller. He had adopted the prevailing teaching assistant attitude of the day, making his classroom less structured, more student-centered. There was a handbook for the teaching assistants detailing how to teach freshman composition, with the students assigned to write an essay a week while reading the essays of Emerson, Thoreau, and Camus, among others, but many of the young teachers found ways to circumvent the curriculum or make it more relevant (the essential word of the times) to the happenings of the sixties. Krasny was part of this movement, yet also “appalled by part of it”—repelled especially by the hostility he saw on campus toward police and soldiers. He had grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland, the son of a dairy worker, and many of his childhood friends were second-generation Poles, Italians, and Slavs who had gone into the service and were fighting now in Vietnam. Others had become cops. Krasny winced whenever he heard his college contemporaries refer to officers as pigs, as some of them had been doing inside the Commerce hallway when he made his way to class. When protesters in the north-south corridor challenged him for holding class at all that day, he satisfied them by saying that he intended to turn the hour into a teach-in on the war, and that is what he did when class started at 1:20, though “relating Tess of the D’Urbervilles to Dow was a bit of a stretch.”
Menacher took in the scene with bewilderment. For a few minutes the open side windows in Krasny’s classroom seemed like the main portal of Commerce. She looked over and saw a ragtag team of students climbing in and striding confidently across the room as though this were a routine passageway. The door to the outside hallway opened for a split second, letting in the ever-louder hum of protest, then closed again, until another round of interlopers appeared. Kr
asny tried to lead a discussion about “what was going on,” linking obstruction outside the door to destruction in Vietnam, but it was a disjointed conversation in which “nobody was totally articulate,” Menacher thought. At about 1:28 the door opened and someone in the hallway shouted, “It’s going to get wild!”
In the crowd outside Krasny’s door stood John Pickart and Everett Goodwin, two students in the UW School of Music. Pickart, a cellist from Madison, was trying intensely to convince Goodwin, a violinist from Wausau, to leave the building. Although Pickart opposed the war, he did not believe in obstruction, and he was worried that Goodwin would get arrested and suspended from school. They were best friends and roommates, part of a trio sharing an east-side apartment on Sherman Avenue near the Oscar Mayer plant. They called themselves “the Berlioz Society.” Goodwin considered himself a follower, not a leader, and a “nonreligious peaceful guy, influenced by Albert Schweitzer and Gandhi.” He thought he was following the teachings of those two great men in his actions now. He and Pickart were deep into a philosophical discussion about civil disobedience and pacifism when they heard rumblings down the hall that protest leaders had returned from a meeting with Sewell and Kauffman at which “the results of the discussion were negative.”
IT WAS A POLICE MATTER, Chancellor Sewell had said, and now the two chiefs placed in charge of the situation stood outside Commerce making final plans. Bill Emery and Ralph Hanson believed that the protesters would use the common civil disobedience tactic of going limp upon arrest, forcing officers to carry them out by their arms and legs. To make the detention process easier, Emery said he would have the Madison Police Department paddy wagon back up to the edge of the Bascom parking lot so that arresting officers would have to drag demonstrators no more than forty feet. When the paddy wagon was filled, they would take the arrested students downtown to the Dane County jail, then return for another load. It would be like a shuttle service, Emery said. He then walked across Observatory Drive toward his band of city officers, assembled under the Carillon Tower, and prepared them for the imminent confrontation. Hanson returned to the front of Commerce alone and pushed his way through the crowd into the foyer, reaching the opening to the east-west corridor where protesters were sitting with their arms linked together.
Marshall Shapiro of radio station WKOW positioned himself near Hanson and turned on his tape recorder. “This is an unlawful assembly,” Hanson said into a bullhorn, his voice weakened by his persistent cold. “We are going to clear the place out.” Only those students closest to him could hear him clearly, but the response was vociferous nonetheless. His words, Hanson testified later, were greeted with “jeers, curses, insults, and tumultuous noises.” Someone standing nearby could be heard saying, “You want to bring in your cops, bring them in, baby!”
Stuart Brandes, looming over the crowd in the back of the foyer no more than fifteen feet from Hanson, strained to hear, but could pick up only part of the message. Brandes did not want to get arrested, so he decided it was time to leave, but that was easier said than done. He found himself “completely hemmed in” by the mass of humanity, unable to escape. Down the east-west corridor, toward the epicenter of the protest where the Dow interviews were being held, Hanson’s warning went largely unheard. Paul Soglin and Jonathan Stielstra, Bob Swacker and Billy Kaplan, Jim Rowen and Susan McGovern—all were down there in the sit-down crowd, expecting something to come but unsure what it would be. Even if they had wanted to, which they did not, they would not have been able to escape. The hallway was impassable. Stielstra was “not planning to get into a fight with the cops.” He had been in a fight only once in his life, back in fifth grade. But did he have some other prank in mind? “You want to see something?” he said to Rowen, revealing the firecrackers in his pocket.
Rowen had no idea who Steilstra was, but the incident worried him. This stranger with the firecrackers seemed to him to be “an impressionable kid.” Now Rowen looked down the corridor toward the foyer and the front of the crowd and saw something else that startled him—a protester taking off his belt and wrapping it around his fist as a makeshift brass-knuckle weapon. Uh-oh, Rowen thought to himself. There are some people here who are going to fight. He hoped otherwise, that protesters would hold the moral high ground and resist through civil disobedience, and that the police would carry them out without violence.
Protest leaders spread the word to get “the beef” up front, near the foyer and back by the interview room. It was at that moment that Michael Oberdorfer made the transition from sympathetic Connections photographer to full-fledged protest participant. He took off his army jacket, placed his Nikon camera in the large front pocket, and sat down right outside the interview room. The time had come for resistance, he believed. The war rolled on and on, the university seemed more beholden to corporate interests, hiding behind its cover story of impartiality. The only thing left was to stop business as usual at the university, Oberdorfer thought, even if only for that one day.
Lock arms, one marshal instructed. Hold your ground. Someone could be heard urging women to kick the officers in the balls.
Hanson found his way out and walked across the street to the police formation under the tower. He had given a final warning to the students, to no avail, he said. William Bablitch, the law student observer, had by then slipped outside to monitor the action and was standing near Hanson. He thought he heard Hanson say, “Let’s take a crack at ’em.” Emery turned to his men and said, “All right, let’s go and carry it out.” Hanson, in civilian clothes and without a helmet, led the way back toward the front of Commerce, followed by Sergeant Buss and his men. Jane Brotman gasped as she watched the sea of students on the plaza open a lane for the wedge of policemen who strode forward with a quickening gait, badges off, elbows out, nightsticks at the ready. The crowd fell in behind the officers, virtually engulfing them. Bablitch was in the group hovering just behind the last man in blue. Emery moved to the side and found a lookout on the rise above the plaza, between Commerce and Bascom, not far from where Brotman stood. He thought of it as “a command position” where he could “see what was going to transpire,” though in fact he could see nothing inside the building.
No more than two minutes after Hanson issued his final plea for the students to leave, here came Sergeant Buss and the wedge of cops, marching through the first set of glass doors. Al Roehling, at Buss’s flank, thought his state of mind was typical of the officers at that moment. He was, he would say later, “full of piss and vinegar and ready to go.” They reached the narrow vestibule, then moved through the second set of doors into the foyer. There was no space to gain footing, just a wall of people, and the human wall surged forward, pushing up against the oncoming force. The officers started flailing with their nightsticks but fell backwards into the vestibule. Chief Hanson was propelled “over and around bodies” and found himself “spilled outside the double doors.” He could not get back inside and was unable to lead or control the police force for the next several minutes. Sergeant Buss braced himself with his feet and arms against the corner of a door in the vestibule and remained there. One officer stumbled against a floor-to-ceiling plate glass window, accidentally breaking it into jagged shards with his nightstick, a frightening sound that added to the panic of the moment. As people around him backed away, the officer kept swinging his club at the window frame, now apparently attempting to clear it of sharp edges of glass. Some in the crowd saw only the raised nightstick, assumed police were on the attack, and started another surge forward in an attempt to keep them away. One officer who had been pushed out of the building caught sight of Emery standing on the slope and ran up to him and said, “Chief, we can’t do it.”
Chancellor Sewell was looking out the back window of Kauffman’s Bascom office with a clean sightline to the front of Commerce. He watched in horror as the first wave of officers marched in and stumbled back out. This cannot be happening at our great university, he thought to himself. His son Chip Sewell, a graduate student at
Wisconsin, came bursting into the room.
“Dad!” he shouted. “Look at those cops going into the building. They’re going to beat the hell out of those kids!”
Sewell was lost, haunted, the well-intentioned man immobilized by events beyond his imagination. “Well, it’s out of my hands now, you know,” he said to his son. “They weren’t listening to me.”
Inside, in the few moments after the glass broke, there was an eerie silence. Then the police regrouped and reentered the foyer, this time without Hanson and with nightsticks raised. Once inside, they felt pressed against a wall, according to Buss, and then “really started using clubs.” John Lederer noticed that the officers “had a very set look on their faces.” Evan Stark, who had led the students to that moment, whose rhetoric resounded with calls for resistance, quickly decided when the time came that physical resistance “was not worth it” and managed to slip around the police and out the double doors, disappearing into the protective embrace of the gathering crowd. He said later that he had ordered everyone to leave when the police began their charge, but if so, fewer people heard this utterance than had heard Chief Hanson’s final declaration of an unlawful assembly.
Stuart Brandes, adrenaline flowing, found himself only a few yards from the police and about to become caught up in the human push against them. Here was his moment of decision, he thought. He could lend his considerable strength to the surge, probably without getting caught, and in so doing participate in what he considered a violent act against police. In that split second, with the cops moving toward him and the students pushing back, he had to decide whether he was willing to resort to force. The answer was no. He was a liberal, not a radical. Although against the war, he was not confrontational and was not going to fight the police. He found an opening and made his way partway up the eastern stairwell, standing amid a group of business school students who were there jeering the protesters and cheering the cops. That is what they were doing, that is, until a few officers rushed the stairs, billy clubs flashing, unwittingly going after their own supporters.
They Marched Into Sunlight Page 46