They Marched Into Sunlight (100 page)

When Betty Menacher of Green Bay said she wanted to go to school in Madison, her father, a lumber salesman, muttered that the state capital was “a cesspool of queers.”

History professor George Mosse, an expert on the rise of fascism, nationalism, and Nazism, took the New Left seriously but criticized radical students for suppressing the speech of others.

When his hair was shorn in jail, protest leader Robert Cohen, a philosophy graduate student, said his jailers failed “to comprehend the historical alternatives to their present non-qualitative existence.”

Evan Stark, graduate student in sociology, the entrancingly fluent orator of the movement. His return to Madison in fall 1967 elicited a round of concerned letters among campus officials.

Minutes before the confrontation in the Commerce Building, Percy Julian, an attorney for the protesters, placed a call to U.S. District Judge James Doyle, who said it was not within his power to stop the police.

“Down with Dow! Down with Dow!” the marchers chanted on their way to the Commerce Building. As they rounded Bascom Hall, local television newsman Blake Kellogg (
in white trench coat
), filmed the protest.

The gray-speckled granite floor virtually disappeared from view as the hallway flooded with demonstrators. The hallway was narrow, a mere ten feet across. This was no place for a claustrophobic.

Students recoil as Madison police make their charge. The tall student on far left is Jonathan Stielstra; in the sheepskin coat on the right, starting to cover his neck, is Paul Soglin. Within seconds, Soglin was on the floor being pummelled by club-wielding officers.

As the police moved into the foyer, there was no space to gain footing, just a wall of people. The officers started flailing with their nightsticks.

After the hallway was cleared, officers huddled in a protective semicircle at the front of Commerce. The confrontation had enraged the crowd. “
Sieg heil! Sieg heil!
” came the shouts.

Jonathan Stielstra scrambling off the Bascom Hall roof after cutting the flag lanyard and setting off firecrackers. This photograph by Norm Lenburg started a manhunt for the flag-cutter.