They Marched Into Sunlight (65 page)

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.

T
HERE 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 officers 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.

By the time Paul Soglin was stitched up and released from the hospital, the demonstration was just about over. He walked back to Commerce to recover his schoolbooks—he had left a notebook and a history book inside—but the police would not let him in. They had control of the building, but a diehard band of demonstrators remained outside, “taunting from the edges.” The sharp odor of tear gas lingered in the air. Soglin walked all the way around Bascom Hall and entered through the front door, walking past a metal Sifting and Winnowing plaque on the way inside. Students were bounding through the foyer and hallway, most of them participants in the protest, some still seeking targets for their rage. One young man grabbed a metal
Daily Cardinal
news box, lifted it above his head, and heaved it at the wall, breaking the glass enclosing an ornate portrait of John Bascom. Soglin kept moving down the hallway toward the administrative offices and found whom he was looking for—Joe Kauffman.

“You lied to us! You lied to us!” Soglin screamed at the dean of students, his antagonist in the legal case
Soglin v. Kauffman.
He was overcome by the rage of a generation, or part of a generation, that was feeling the betrayal of the young by the old. The way he saw it, the protesters were supposed to follow certain rules and the authorities would follow certain rules, but “we did and they didn’t.” Kauffman turned away, and Soglin followed him down the corridor, so angry that he started crying.

It had been four years exactly, to the day, since Soglin had attended his first Vietnam protest, which also happened to be the first ever Vietnam demonstration on the Wisconsin campus. He was a sophomore then, on October 18, 1963, when he was photographed as a face in the crowd of a few hundred students who rallied on the Union steps to denounce the regime of soon-to-be-assassinated Ngo Dinh Diem. Four years: as long as the Civil War, as long as Americans fought in World War II, as long as an undergraduate education—a seeming lifetime during which nothing had changed and everything had changed. As the Vietnam war had deepened and become more complicated, so too had the antiwar movement at Wisconsin. The warm note that Soglin had written to President Harrington on May 19, 1966, the one in which he had said that he was “thrilled” about the way students and university officials handled the sit-in at the administration building, the handwritten note that had surprised Harrington so much that he made a typed copy of it and sent it back to Soglin so he might remember how he once felt—that seemed like ancient history now, gone forever. Instead, the metaphorical prediction that Soglin had made in his recent “Hi There, Badger!” column in the
Daily Cardinal
had come all too true. The pot had blown up in Chancellor Sewell’s face.

H
ERE THEY WERE,
side by side, on the front page of the final edition of the
Milwaukee Journal
that afternoon, both above the fold, early reports from the battlefields of war and peace. First, on the upper left, an understated dispatch from Madison: “Club swinging policemen and hundreds of angry, yelling University of Wisconsin students clashed Wednesday afternoon in a battle that left at least 12 students injured. At least one ambulance was called. The policemen waded into the Commerce building where about 150 demonstrators were protesting job recruiting by Dow Chemical Co., makers of napalm for Vietnam.”

Then, tucked beside it, with a Saigon dateline: “A veteran Communist regiment ambushed two companies of the United States 1st infantry division in canopied jungles 41 miles north of Saigon Tuesday. After a day of fierce fighting, 58 Americans and at least 103 Communists had been killed and 61 Americans wounded. The battle took a costly toll of American officers. Among them were Maj. Donald W. Holleder, a quarterback voted the most valuable player of Army’s 1955 football team, and Lt. Col. Terry Allen Jr., whose father commanded the 1st division in Tunisia and Sicily in World War II.”

Allen and Holleder were still the only identified casualties in the account from Vietnam. Even with the front-page story in the local paper, his family had no idea yet that Danny Sikorski had been in the battle.

A
T QUARTER TO FIVE,
six hours after the first protesters entered Commerce, as the action appeared to be winding down at last, Chief Emery left campus to attend a Police and Fire Commission meeting back at the City-County Building. He let John Patrick Hunter of the
Capital Times
hitch a ride, and as they rolled through the October darkness away from campus, Emery sighed and muttered to himself, “It was just awful. It was terrible. How did they ever let things get down to this?”

By half past five the last students had left the plaza outside Commerce, and the battalion of city and campus officers, along with the late-arriving sheriff’s deputies, finally withdrew from their battle stations. The Dow protest was over, but its effects were not. Nineteen officers, in addition to the forty-seven students, had been taken to the hospital, and three of them, including Detective McCarthy, were the most seriously injured of anyone. Sewell, after conferring with President Harrington, released a statement to the press. He reiterated the university regulations that led him to call in the police, an action that he had not wanted to take. “I deeply regret that it was necessary to bring police onto the campus to maintain the operations of the university. This was done only after our officers and staff found it impossible to maintain order,” he said. “I regret that students and police were injured. This must not be repeated.” In hopes of cooling things down, he added, he was temporarily suspending the Dow interviews pending a special faculty meeting that he was calling for three thirty the next day. Sometime after the statement went out, some angry students returned to Dean Kauffman’s office and tried to start a fire outside his door. The damages were minimal, the perpetrators never caught.

News of the calamitous events had reached the other end of State Street and sent the state legislature into full fury. Before adjourning that evening, the assembly passed a resolution calling the demonstration “a flagrant abuse and perversion of the treasured traditions of academic freedom.” Disruptive students, the resolution declared, should be expelled from the university. Milwaukee assemblyman Edward Mertz issued a familiar refrain, that the legislature should “take over” the university, which he said was in danger of being seized by “long-haired, greasy pigs.” On the senate side, conservative lions were roaring. “Communism is on that campus and it’s operating today,” declared Senator Gordon Roseleip of Darlington. Leland McParland of Cudahy was in an executioner’s mood. “We should shoot them if necessary,” he said of protesting students. “I would. I would. Because it’s insurrection.”

A
FTER EATING AND REGROUPING
in the Rathskeller, Soglin marched up the hill one more time and returned to the Commerce Building to get his books. It was an eerie sight, the place empty, shards of broken glass still in the vestibule, the east-west hallway a mess of papers, plastic cups, clothing, debris. Soglin found his books, right where he had left them, and moved on to a seven o’clock meeting where protest leaders would talk about what to do next. Everything had indeed changed. A young woman walked into the meeting and declared, “I’m a radical! I’m a radical! I don’t know what it means, but will someone please explain it to me. I’ve just become a radical.”

There was a mass meeting at the Great Hall in the Union at nine that night, and the crowd was so vast, more than three thousand students, that they moved it outside to the Library Mall. Ron Davis and his San Francisco Mime Troupe, who originally had been scheduled to hold a seminar on guerrilla theater, instead helped serve as meeting facilitators. “The meeting was hectic, but instructive,” Davis wrote later. “There was no clear line, many of the students, as usual, didn’t know about Dow’s involvement in the war or the complicity of the university. But many were disturbed that their fellow students had been bashed by clubs, gassed, and dragged off…. Personal assault was more important than any of the protest factors. We stood by, watching and listening. It was instructive to us as well. What would the organizers come up with?” Percy Julian, attorney for the students, took the bullhorn and asked people who had been inside or outside Commerce to provide eyewitness accounts that could be used in court. Several dozen sympathetic faculty members, alarmed that police had invaded their academic sanctuary, attended the open-air rally and formed a symbolic protective ring around the students, who finally voted to strike classes until the faculty permanently barred city police from campus and the administration agreed not to punish leaders of the Dow sit-in.

Soglin had begun the day as just another person in the ranks of the protesters, but here was his opportunity to take a leading role. Stark was gone, and many of the protest lieutenants had gone into hiding, fearful that they would be suspended or expelled. Soglin and his University Community Action Party, which had supported the protest all along, were ready to assert leadership. He gave one of his first public speeches that night; countless more would follow. And along with his emergence, the ranks of the antiwar movement on campus seemed to have grown exponentially in that single day, or at least the ranks of people agitated by what they had seen or experienced. Davis was right in that respect; many in the crowd knew little about Vietnam, the distant war, but were reacting viscerally to the sight of the police clubs.