CHIEF HANSON had been out of the action since that initial foray when he had been pushed back through the vestibule. He saw only the first few seconds of the confrontation inside. From the front plaza he had walked down the slope to enter the building from the western side, a floor below the main level, and was walking up the stairwell when he encountered a band of students rushing down toward the exit. He heard someone shout, “They’re coming, they’re coming,” and presumed this referred to the police. Hanson decided to leave with this group and went back across the street to the original police assembly area near the Carillon Tower, where he found his bullhorn. Looking across Observatory Drive at the front entrance of Commerce, he saw students spilling out the double doors, the police forming a semicircle in front of the doors, and an enormous crowd now stirring behind the ring of officers. “This was a growing or escalating crowd of people,” Hanson later testified. “Some of the people coming out, they were holding their hands on their head, some of the girls were crying hysterically, some of these people came over to me and for the next few minutes they were in front of me. The students who had formed around him, Hanson said, were “verbally abusing me, in other words subjecting me to insults and spitting on me and this type of thing.”
Michael Reiter, an attorney for the student protest leaders, approached the chief and urged him to do something about the bloody confrontation inside. The police were using clubs, Reiter said, and Hanson should go in an attempt to stop them. Hanson said that things were beyond his control, that he could not get back inside. Reiter persisted. He said that he and a few other students would form a cordon and clear the way for him through the mass of students. “I indicated to them that I didn’t think I could get in there but I was willing to try,” Hanson recalled. “This they did then. They did form a wedge for me through this—now I am calling it a hostile and belligerent, defiant, mad, frenzied crowd.”
“Let him through! Let him through!” Reiter shouted to the students as he led Hanson across the plaza toward the front doors of Commerce. As Hanson recalled the difficult procession, he got “a couple punches in the face and one in the back.” He saw some people charging at him, but they were blocked, and he made it to the perimeter and had the bullhorn up and was yelling “Stop! Stop! Stop it! Stop it!” But when he reached the vestibule and stepped into the foyer, he looked down the corridors and there was nobody there—nobody, that is, except police officers.
Chancellor Sewell had not moved from the back window of the Bascom office. He saw the students staggering out of Commerce, heads bloodied, disappearing into a thunderous crowd that now numbered nearly five thousand. My God, I’ve just screwed everything up.
Jonathan Stielstra, now a face in that angry mob, looked up toward Bascom Hall, his gaze moving above Sewell at the window, up to the peaked roof of the old building, where he noticed the Wisconsin and American flags flapping in the breeze. How incongruous, he thought. How could the flags fly above this mess? This is not right, he thought. This is not what the flags stand for. At that moment, acting on impulse, the young philosopher from Michigan, the earnest transfer student from Calvin College, the son of a university administrator and nephew of a Dow executive, came up with a brazen plan.
Chapter 23
Stars and Stripes
DOWNTOWN AT police headquarters, Tom McCarthy was trying to dictate a report to the secretary of the detective squad, but he kept being distracted by anxious squawks coming over the scanner in the captain’s office. It was obvious that something had gone terribly wrong on campus—that “the shit was hitting the fan down there.” McCarthy stopped to listen, then dictated again, then listened to the radio some more. He was not altogether unhappy to be away from the action at Commerce. When Chief Emery had called for volunteers for riot-control duty, McCarthy had not volunteered. He wanted nothing to do with the long-haired kids and was content to dislike them from afar. That time on the city bus when he told a hippie-looking student that someone should drop a nuclear bomb on top of Bascom Hall, he was only half joking. He was a detective, not a riot-control cop. He worked in street clothes, tracking down thugs and robbers. It was best, he thought, to stay away from the demonstration.
Before McCarthy could finish dictating his report, Jack Harrington, the chief inspector, came by and barked, “C’mon, Tom, you and I are going down there.” It was an order, not a request. On the way out the door, they picked up Lieutenant Jim McNally. The three officers headed toward campus in an unmarked Dodge: Harrington driving, McNally riding shotgun, McCarthy in the back seat. Only McNally was in uniform. The radio reports sounded more dire by the minute as they wheeled down Langdon Street, past the Union, right at Park, and then a quick left and up the incline of Observatory Drive as it curved above Lake Mendota. They had reached the crest of Bascom Hill and were heading down toward Commerce and Social Science when a rock came hurtling toward them and cracked the windshield.
A squad of students, their emotions let loose by the confrontation at Commerce, spilled into the street, preparing to surround the car. One young man jumped on the hood and began smashing the windshield with his boot. Another officer who happened to be nearby chased the culprit toward Bascom Hall. Perry Pierre, a first-year law student from tiny Seymour, Wisconsin, had been standing on the grass in front of Bascom and witnessed the scene. “Here comes this kid running through the crowd, running towards us, and the police officer is chasing,” he reported later. “We trip the kid, and stop him, and the police officer gets there and jumps on top of him. And we say, ‘Hey, wait a minute! We didn’t trip him for you to beat the crap out of him.’” Detective McCarthy, in the meantime, had slipped out the back door of the Dodge and crawled on his hands and knees through the vast throng of students, trying to go unrecognized. When he saw a clearing, he rose and made a run for it toward the front of Commerce, where he joined his fellow officers at the main entrance.
The last demonstrators were being cleared from the building as McCarthy arrived. He saw students with bloody heads being treated on the lawn. He stood there without a helmet or nightstick, protected only by his trenchcoat, as thousands of students screamed obscenities and chanted, “Sieg heil! Sieg heil!” An hour earlier many of them had been curious bystanders; now the vast majority seemed at least temporarily radicalized and hostile to authorities. McCarthy went inside and encountered his longtime colleague, Captain George Schiro, who had been stationed in the east-west corridor all day.
“What the fuck happened?” McCarthy asked.
“Don’t ask me,” Schiro responded.
He directed McCarthy and the others to go back outside and push the crowd further from the door. If they formed another wedge, he said, perhaps they could clear the plaza all the way back to the Carillon Tower across the street. McCarthy and five other officers attempted to clear the plaza, but were able to move forward only a few feet when the huge crowd surged back at them. As they started to retreat, Officer Bert Hoffman was struck in the throat, perhaps by someone who had grabbed his baton. McCarthy, at that point, was thinking of only one thing: survival.
PAUL SOGLIN by then had staggered through the crowd to Observatory Drive, where a station wagon awaited, a makeshift ambulance that would ferry him and several other wounded students two blocks down Charter Street to the University of Wisconsin Medical Center. Where did this driver come from? How did he have the foresight to know he might be needed? Why are they letting him drive on campus through this chaos? In moments of crisis, odd little questions can run through the mind, and those are the questions that obsessed Soglin at that moment. He had no answers. The sheepskin coat had done its job, he said to himself again. There was no blood on it; the nightsticks had never made it to his scalp. There was a small cut on his forehead and a larger gash on his shin. He was brought to the emergency room through the back entrance of the hospital.
Word of mass casualties had reached the hospital only a few minutes before the first students arrived. After emerging from Commerce with the injured y
oung woman, Michael Oberdorfer had raced down the hill to the emergency room exit. “You’ve got to get up there,” he shouted to the hospital staff. “People are being seriously injured by the police!” At about the same time, Dr. Robert Samp had been walking across Charter Street from his office to the hospital when “a kid with a handkerchief wrapped around his head, covered with blood,” approached and asked whether he was a doctor. The student said he was among dozens of students inside Commerce who had been injured. Samp told the student how to get to the emergency room, then found a telephone and asked the hospital operator to make the calls that would set in motion the disaster plan. The medical center had been rehearsing how to handle “catastrophic occurrences,” and here was the first opportunity to put the plan in action. They were ready by the time “a stream of students began pouring in,” as Dr. Robert Hickey, the chairman of surgery described the scene. The university’s medical staff had not expected the disaster but had prepared for it in any case.
Still, the atmosphere in the emergency room at first reflected the chaos of the events that preceded it. Some students were distraught, even hysterical, and lashed out at any figures of authority, even doctors who would treat them. “The initial response was one of agitation and aggressiveness toward the physicians,” Dr. Hickey noted in his report on the treatment of injured students. “And the companions of those injured were more prone to this emotional outlook.” The doctors tried to remain cool, Hickey said, and “followed an agreed-upon position not to offer an expression of judgment.” Soon enough, he noted, “order was established and maintained.” Hickey was in charge of triage, making the first cursory examination of patients before sending them along to X-rays and treatment. Each student was also given a tetanus shot. Forty-seven students were treated, half of them with head wounds. “In interpreting the trauma, the students were mainly injured with nightsticks, a weapon which produces a cutting injury to the scalp,” Hickey reported. “A scalp wound is vascular, bleeds profusely, and is alarming. These facts are consistent with our observations.”
While he was being treated for a leg gash, which required stitches, Soglin asked about the head wounds. They looked horrendous, a doctor told him, because of all the blood dripping down, but were not as damaging as they appeared. None of the students with broken scalps required surgery. The confrontation had been awful enough, but some apparently felt an urge to make it look worse. Journalists noticed some students playing to the cameras, moaning until photographers turned away, then smiling in private. Two students who were taken to the emergency room had smeared the blood of others onto their heads to make it look as though they had been injured. But most of the agony was real. William Bablitch, the law student observer, escorted a group to the hospital; he reported that “there was no doubt that these students were seriously injured. One fellow that I helped carry had a slash in his head and he was bleeding profusely and he was semiconscious. I lifted him up and we commandeered a car that was able to get through and I carried him into the back seat of the car and at that point he was just crying, ‘My hand! My hand!’ and I looked at his hand and it was just swelled completely out of proportion.”
Jim Rowen and Susan McGovern, after avoiding injury inside Commerce, had made their way to the front row of the crowd on the plaza. They were “just livid, outraged” by what they had witnessed, Rowen said, and wanted to express that outrage now to the police who had formed a protective semicircle in front of the main entrance. They joined in the curses and chants of “Sieg heil.” Rowen noticed that a hailstorm of debris was coming over his head, aimed at the officers—“shoes, textbooks, rocks, people throwing anything they could.” The crowd surged forward and knocked him and a few other students toward the cops, causing a messy scrum. Officer Roehling’s helmet got ripped and the band fell over his eyes, temporarily blinding him as he fell. He felt a kick in the head but had so many people on top of him that he was protected from any more blows. Rowen was struck by a baton, a glancing blow in the back of the head, as he fell. “We all just wanted to get up, but we couldn’t,” he recalled. “Everyone in the pile was swearing. ‘God damn, get off me! I can’t! Someone’s on me!’” He finally wriggled out of the pile and resumed his place at the front of the enraged crowd.
Oberdorfer, having returned from his run to the hospital, was near the front of the throng. He grabbed a badgeless Madison policeman and screamed in his face, “You got kids? You got kids?”
The officer did not respond. “How come you won’t tell me who you are?” Oberdorfer stormed. “I’ll tell you who I am. I’m Michael Oberdorfer. That’s O-b-e-r-d-o-r-f-e-r. Five forty-eight West Main Street.” Someone wrote it down.
Jonathan Stielstra was nearby, and after catching sight of the flags waving above Bascom Hall, he noticed that a crowd had formed on the northwest balcony off the top floor, just below the midsection of the Bascom roof where the flagpole stood. It seemed easy enough to get to the balcony, just climb the middle stairs of the old building to the top and walk out the side door, so he went up to “reconnoiter.” From there he assessed what it would take to reach the flagpole on the gently slanted roof. It looked “doable enough,” he thought. A steam vent offered a foothold from which he could shimmy up. His tennis shoes would give him good traction. But to finish the deed, he needed wire cutters to snap the steel cable. Where could he get wire cutters? He remembered that one of his roommates on Drake Street had a toolbox.
Stielstra scrambled down the stairs and out the front door of Bascom, skirting past the Abe Lincoln statue to the bottom of the hill, where he found his old English three-speed sprawled sideways on the ground, unlocked, near where the demonstrators had assembled that morning. Down Park Street he pedaled, then right on Regent and left on Mills, all the way to the little house at 1215 Drake. The toolbox was on the first floor, in the utility room next to the kitchen, and the wirecutters were in the toolbox. They could be used one-handed, Stielstra noticed. On another shelf he saw a book of matches. Another bold notion. He remembered the firecrackers that someone had given him and that he had stuffed into his pocket that morning. He grabbed the matches, raced out the door, and biked furiously back to campus, standing up as he rounded the corners and churned uphill, this time heading directly to Bascom Hall.
JIM BOLL, the district attorney, was horrified by the scene he encountered when he reached the Commerce Building shortly before two o’clock. The violent confrontation inside the building was over by then. The police had formed a protective cordon at the main entrance, holding off the massive throng of screaming students. Boll made his way through the police line, was given a goofy-looking white riot helmet with a football-style chin strap by one of the cops, and climbed the stairs to the flat roof of Commerce to survey the chaos from there. It was only three stories above the plaza, and as he stood in full view of demonstrators below, he was shocked to realize that many recognized him. When he was a student in Madison in the 1950s, having come down from the northern Wisconsin town of Antigo, he had no idea who the Dane County district attorney was, nor did he care. Now the students were shouting his name, bracketing it with obscenities. Boll, you son of a bitch! Hey, Boll, you bastard. Fascist! Sieg heil, Boll! He decided to leave the roof and went out behind the police line, where he stood next to John Patrick Hunter, a respected political reporter for the Capital Times.
A young woman rushed toward them and snapped, “Boll, you suck cock!”
“No, I deny that,” Boll responded. Hunter broke into a laugh.
Radio newsman Marshall Shapiro, who had been standing nearby, realized the demonstration-turned-riot was big enough for the national news. He scurried across the street to the lobby of Social Science and gathered his notes to file a report as a stringer for CBS radio. The WKOW radio news director had seen much of the action, inside and out. The students packed in the hallway “like sardines.” Hanson declaring the assembly unlawful. Police marching in. Demonstrators trapped inside, nowhere to go, arms locked, some resisting, some being clubb
ed. Students stumbling out, bloody and shrieking. The huge, angry crowd. Officers being pelted by debris. As he thought back on it later, Shapiro would conclude that the police had “overreacted,” but at the time he was “just there to report the story,” not to make judgments. He was a townie himself who had grown up with many of the cops in the old Greenbush neighborhood, and if anything, his sentiments were with them. He was not sympathetic to the antiwar cause, because he “didn’t understand it.” Aside from editors at the Capital Times there were, he believed, “very few in the media at that time who did understand it, at least speaking for the local radio and television media. Almost all of us believed that the government, the establishment—that you just don’t question them, that they know what is right for the country and you just follow along like sheep.”
Still, the confrontation came as “a total shock, something that was unexpected by everybody,” and it left Shapiro with contradictory feelings. On the one hand he was thinking, “God damn, they deserved that. They took over classes. If they got whacked it was their own fault.” Yet the day’s events also shook him up and forced him to consider the war in a way he never had before—“at least a little bit.” Shapiro’s sixty-second piece, including audio and a you-are-there extemporaneous style, led the two o’clock national news report. His only regret was that broadcaster Douglas Edwards transposed the call letters, introducing him as a reporter for WOKW. Not long after filing the report, Shapiro left campus and drove out to the WKOW television station on the far west side. He was a man of many hats, serving as both radio news director and television substitute sports anchor, but now he had to change clothes for the role for which he was best known. A preposterous transition, but such was life then: he would go from covering the Dow riot to putting on a cowboy suit and hat and badge to entertain a group of five-year-olds on the afternoon cartoon show he hosted as “Marshall the Marshal.”
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