Dave Wagner, a senior in comparative literature, was arriving at the scene about the time Shapiro was leaving. Wagner’s wife, Grace, who had been translating German documents at the State Historical Society, followed the demonstration from the beginning that day. She called him at their third-floor apartment at 105 State Street up near the square. He had been home studying for a test when the violence erupted inside Commerce. “You’ve got to get down here,” Grace told him. “They’re beating the shit out of everybody.” Wagner hopped on a city bus and rode down to State and Park, then walked up Bascom Hill and into the “sea of people screaming at the cops.”
As the literary editor of Connections, the alternative newspaper that had been formed in response to the first Dow protest the previous February, Wagner was looking for his Connections compatriots, who were ubiquitous this day. Bob Gabriner, the editor, was there, the intellectual force quietly observing the action. As soon as Gabriner saw Wagner, he gave him an assignment. They were going to put out a special edition of the paper, Gabriner said. The Great Dow War. Start interviewing people and gathering information. Wagner went to work—and never attended another class that semester. The journalists at Connections had no use for mainstream notions of objectivity. Objectivity, Wagner would argue, “was no more than a literary device, like any other literary device.” In any case, the connections of Connections to the Dow demonstration were anything but neutral. Gabriner’s wife, Miss Sifting and Winnowing, was in the paddy wagon, looking out in her whiteface. Stuart Ewen, a co-founder and feature writer, had been one of the lead organizers of the protest, a righthand man to Evan Stark, as was Richard Samson, the news editor. Michael Oberdorfer, the art director and photographer, had been in the middle of the action. Stark and Bob Cohen, the movement orators, were on the fringe of the Connections crowd and listed as contributors to the newspaper.
The students who took part in the protest acted from their own convictions, with individual motivations and expectations, sharing the one overriding common principle of being opposed to the war in Vietnam. But they walked into a situation that was shaped nonetheless by self-selected leaders, and in that respect the Dow demonstration was in many respects a Connections production, with an assist from Quixote, the literary magazine. It was Quixote’s editor, Morris Edelson, after all, who had brought the San Francisco Mime Troupe to town in the first place. Edelson also had marched up the hill that morning with the protesters but declined to go inside Commerce, fearing that violence would erupt. Instead he found a perch on the northwest balcony of Bascom Hall and watched from there. After the halls of Commerce had been cleared and the action turned to the plaza outside, Edelson heaved loose concrete and pipes and other debris onto the roofs of police cars and the paddy wagon parked in the lot directly below him. His philosophy, he explained, was that he “didn’t want to destroy the whole place, just dent it, throw some sand in the machinery.”
Edelson was not alone. In the heat of the moment people responded in ways they never had before. David Westley, a sophomore dropout from Madison who worked at the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union, found himself going “from a pacifist to a militant” as he stood in the plaza watching students emerge from Commerce with bloody heads. He became so enraged that he picked up some paving bricks and started throwing them toward the police line. Others nearby were doing the same.
Detective McCarthy was standing down there, in his light tan trenchcoat, without a helmet or baton, surrounded by angry students, trying to dodge the incoming debris, feeling hopeless. The police had “done everything wrong you could think of,” he thought. The students had managed to let the air out of the tires of two squad cars up in the Bascom lot. They had surrounded the paddy wagon and rocked it so much that the authorities felt compelled to release Miss Sifting and Winnowing and the others. As McCarthy saw it, no one “knew what the hell to do.” And then an object—he was never sure what it was, a brick or a heavy shoe, most likely—came hurtling down and struck him flush in the nose. McCarthy did not see it. He slumped to the cement, unconscious. Jack Cipperly, the assistant dean, had been standing next to McCarthy, and in his periphery vision had noticed an object (he thought it was a brick) coming and had ducked just in time, only to see it strike McCarthy. With McCarthy’s blood dripping on his face, Cipperly helped two officers carry the detective inside to the nearest classroom.
Captain Schiro took him from there, cradling McCarthy in his lap. Still dazed but slowly regaining consciousness, McCarthy noticed that Schiro was rummaging through his trenchcoat. “Where’s your gun?” Schiro asked. McCarthy said he didn’t have one; no way he was going to bring a gun down to that mess, he said. Blood was still streaming down his face. The pain became intense. A bone in his nose had been pushed close to his eyeball. The bridge in his teeth was knocked out. Every time Schiro touched him, it hurt more. Chief Emery came into the room, then Ralph Hanson. It was not a happy place.
“Who the hell gave the order?” Emery asked.
Schiro said it wasn’t him. He had been inside, down the hallway, when all hell broke loose. Hanson said it wasn’t him. He had been concerned about the nightsticks all along, he said, and had been reassured by the Madison police that they would not use them. Jack Cipperly, standing next to Hanson, wiped “some spittum” off his coat. McCarthy was drifting in and out of consciousness, listening in disbelief, as the three senior cops argued about who gave what orders. It seemed, McCarthy thought, that they didn’t know any more about it than he did.
Bob Hartwig, a sergeant on Hanson’s university force, helped load McCarthy onto a stretcher and carry him out the western exit, away from the main entrance, to a waiting ambulance. The emergency room was buzzing with students when they brought him in. A doctor asked whether he was a police officer. The conversation was overheard by someone who shouted, “He’s a cop!” A friend of an injured student, in a rage, lunged toward McCarthy and “gobbed” on him. The spitter was shoved away by a doctor, who then placed McCarthy in a private room. Hickey came by to examine him. It looked serious, he said. The detective would need surgery.
Chief Emery had long considered McCarthy a handful, an officer who took his police mission to the edge of what was permissible, occasionally crossing the line, but whatever had happened on this chaotic afternoon could not be blamed on McCarthy. He had come to the assistance of his buddies and stood there and got hit in the nose and knocked unconscious. Not long after McCarthy was carried out the side door of Commerce, Emery decided that he could not let the boisterous crowd remain assembled on the plaza any longer. He walked up to the Bascom parking lot and called for a supply of tear gas. When the canisters were delivered from downtown a few minutes later, Emery directed Captain Schiro and a few of his men to disperse the crowd.
Tear gas had never been released on the Wisconsin campus before. Soon enough, the noxious, burning scent would become as familiar on Bascom Hill as the pungent odor of algae blooming in Lake Mendota on a midsummer’s day. But in the use of tear gas, as in many other respects, this demonstration was a first, a prelude to all that was to come at Wisconsin and other campuses over the next four years. The police had no practice using tear gas; the students had no experience dealing with it. One canister was accidentally dropped next to a huddle of professors standing near the Carillon Tower. Another was picked up by a student and thrown back at the policemen. The wind was swirling. “We had a very poor day for the use of tear gas because it was so windy it wouldn’t stay,” Chief Emery later noted. “The crowd would move out immediately from downwind of the gas, but lieutenants”—here he was talking about demonstration marshals—“would muster forces back into the area again to close the gap.”
That is not to say that the tear gas had no effect. Stuart Brandes, the history doctoral student, reported that he “saw many students crying and vomiting”—among them curious bystanders who had nothing to do with the protest. Warren Wade, the political science graduate student who hours earlier had pretended that he wanted to be interv
iewed by Dow, and who thought the students, not the police, had provoked the violence, was now on the Commerce plaza. He heard the pop of a tear gascanister going off about twenty feet away and, unable to see, he stumbled back toward the Social Science Building, where he was blinded for about ten minutes, he estimated. Tom Beckmann, the business student from Whitefish Bay who had been taking a class inside Commerce, was also out there, watching, and was alarmed when the tear gas wafted toward him and his eyes started burning. He and a cluster of students scrambled up a fire escape on the side of Bascom Hall and barged into the back of a huge lecture hall where a professor was holding forth on art history, oblivious, until then, of the chaos outside. Another canister exploded at the feet of Eric Nathan, the junior from Manhattan. He stumbled away, tearing and temporarily blinded, until he collapsed on the sidewalk at the side of Bascom Hall. A young woman rushed to him, treated him with water—the wrong treatment for tear gas, but no one knew it then—and walked him back to his apartment on West Johnson.
Jane Brotman, the freshman from New Jersey, who had watched the entire protest after skipping her French literature review, had no idea what tear gas was or how to react when a canister landed near her. Given her “anxiety and fearful nature,” as she put it later, she started thinking, “What if you breathe this in and you die?” She was terrified. “Does this make you blind?” She started running and didn’t stop until she had reached the safety of her familiar table in the back of the Rathskeller, where she began to take stock of everything she had seen that day. Betty Menacher, who had been watching the action after climbing out the window of her freshman composition classroom, heard someone shout “Tear gas! Look out!” The people around her dashed away, but she stood still, “watching this thing come through the air.” It hit the cement “and this huge cloud of tear gas” floated right at her. That was enough excitement, Menacher decided. She walked back to Sellery Hall, barely able to see through her contacts.
When the tear gas floated toward Evan Stark, he ducked into the Social Science Building and found a bathroom where he could wash his eyes. An odd thought popped into his mind—“Why not check the mail?”—so he went upstairs to the sociology department. The hallway was empty, he noted, but “faculty members were clustered at the windows in the offices overlooking the melee, occasionally cheering a student they recognized.” Stark “slipped in next to them for a few minutes, realizing the irony of this ‘participant observation,’” before heading back downstairs and out into the crowd. His days as a radical leader on the Wisconsin campus were over. He visited the hospital, briefly, then left the campus and the city, resigning from school before he could be suspended.
Jonathan Stielstra had returned from his homeward errand and was now heading toward his mission atop Bascom Hall. When he reached the northwest balcony, Stielstra was single-minded; he felt no concern about whether he would be caught and in fact wanted to be seen. He went to the wall, found a foothold on the vent, pulled himself up to the roof, and strode to the flagpole. Holding the wire cutters with one hand, he snapped the lanyard on the flagpole, holding the cable at the same time so that the flags would not fall until he had put the wire cutters back in his coat pocket and lit the firecrackers with his free hand. He did not want this to be a tree crashing in the forest unseen and unheard. This was to be a public statement, a visible, political act of defiance. He did not consider it a desecration of the Stars and Stripes. He considered himself an idealist who was disgusted by what he thought was a contradiction—“the idea of what the flag stood for, flying free over what had just happened on the plaza and in the building.”
It was windy, and it took a few strikes before the firecrackers lit. Pop! Pop! Pop! Stielstra opened his fist and released the cut cable, and the American and Wisconsin flags started to fall.
Rowen heard the loud pops, remembered someone flashing firecrackers in the crowded corridor, and looked up at the top of Bascom in time to see the same guy scrambling on the roof. Norman Lenburg, a photographer for the Wisconsin State Journal, had spotted him even before the firecrackers made their public announcement. After the first volley of tear gas, Lenburg had decided to position himself on Bascom’s northwest balcony so that he could take better pictures if the police fired another round. He had been standing up there for about fifteen minutes, amid a group of a few dozen people, when out of the corner of his eye he noticed someone walking up the slanted roof toward the flagpole. What’s he doing? Lenburg wondered. “And all of a sudden the guy’s kind of kneeling at the base of the flagpole and I don’t have a clue what he’s trying to do.” Just as Lenburg swung his camera around to shoot a picture, the student set off firecrackers and ran. Click. Lenburg got one vertical shot of the flag coming down and the perpetrator dashing away. It was not much of a picture, he thought at the time, too much flagpole and dull gray sky, but it certainly told a story.
Bob Rennebohm and Don Thayer, two UW freshman townies from Madison West High, also stationed on the northwest balcony, had seen someone climbing the roof toward the flagpole but had thought nothing of it at first. Their attention was drawn in the other direction, past Commerce toward the parking lot beyond Social Science, where they noticed a busload of riot-equipped reinforcements, Dane County sheriff’s deputies, disembarking and starting to march down Charter Street toward the rear doors of Commerce. Then the firecrackers went off and Rennebohm and Thayer turned again and saw the American flag fluttering down. The entire scene had been shocking to the two freshmen, who had gone to the rooftop balcony to watch the demonstration after finding the way back to their dorm at Tripp Hall blocked by thousands of people. They had never seen authority figures challenged so angrily before, but this, cutting down the flag, was the ultimate shock. “Once his mission was complete,” Rennebohm remembered, “this guy coolly ran down the inclined roof and walked within several feet of us to the door…and he was gone.”
Not quite that easily, as it turned out. Someone in the crowd yelled “Get him!” as Stielstra clambered down from the roof, and the chase began. A few students were running toward him as he jumped off the incline. He beat them to the door. Although he never looked back at his pursuers, in his imagination, and from the sounds, he thought three or four people were behind him.
During Stielstra’s teenaged years in West Lafayette, his family had lived in an old converted farmhouse where he and his twin brother, Phil, shared a room on the third floor. They often held races to see who could get to the first floor first, so Jonathan had become “pretty adroit at getting down stairs.” Now he was taking full advantage of his long-striding six-foot-two frame, descending several steps at a time. By the third floor he was already outpacing the pack. “Which way did he go?” he heard someone shout. He had never experienced an adrenaline rush like this before. No way they were going to catch him. He kept racing all the way down to the basement, where he fled down the hallway to the south end, turned a corner, ducked into an empty classroom, closed the door, and slumped to the floor. He was winded; his heart was thumping wildly. He stayed in hiding for several minutes, until he regained his breath and was certain that the posse had given up. Then he walked up to the first floor and out the side door, slipping unobtrusively into the crowd outside Commerce. He found his twin brother, the one person he knew he could count on, and felt more secure standing next to Phil the rest of the afternoon.
THERE WAS MORE TEAR GAS, more scrambling, more regrouping, more shouting, more chaos. The original focus of the protest, Vietnam and the Dow Chemical Company’s role in the manufacture of napalm, now seemed incidental, if not forgotten. Now it was kids against cops. Curly Hendershot, the Dow recruiter, was long gone from the scene, escorted out a back exit after the corridors had been cleared. At one point a faculty member approached Emery and Hanson and offered his theory that if the police disappeared, the students would leave soon enough. It was worth a try, the chiefs thought. They pulled their men off the plaza and stationed them out of sight inside Commerce. No one left, so the officer
s reemerged ten minutes later, and this time managed to take control of more territory, forming a cordon on the outer perimeter of the plaza, forcing the students back to the sidewalk near Observatory Drive or up on the ridge between Commerce and Bascom. With the next volley of tear gas, Jim Rowen and Susan McGovern moved away from the plaza toward the back of Commerce above Van Vleck Hall. They came across a Madison police officer who looked disheveled, his helmet gone, his shirt covered with spittle. He did not look injured, Rowen thought, “just sort of in a daze. And he was talking to himself. And he was saying, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. This is terrible. I’ve never seen anything like this.’”
The officer marched in one direction, back toward the front of Commerce, and Rowen and McGovern in the other, down the hill toward the Union. They too were “in a state of shock, dumbfounded” by what had happened. Only hours earlier they had marched up Bascom Hill as “naïve, vaguely pacifistic liberals expecting to engage in some civil disobedience that at worst would get us arrested or expelled,” as McGovern later put it, with “no expectation of violence being used by the police, no sense that we would become outraged and radicalized in ways we could not have known prior to the events.” But now here they were, walking back down the hill feeling a deep and irreversible transformation. Rowen had always thought the notion of having a “radicalizing experience” was jargon, but now he felt it. He felt like an outsider—“outside American society, outside American culture.” He had tried to follow the tradition of civil disobedience, he thought, and had been rewarded for it by being clubbed and tear gassed. “Everything had changed,” he thought. The rules had changed. His goals had changed. The outsider—it was a feeling he had never had before that day, October 18, 1967, and one that he would never entirely shake thereafter, even during later decades when he worked within the system as a city official.
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