They Marched Into Sunlight (30 page)

Before drafting a lawsuit, Reiter and Julian asked Soglin to write an affidavit explaining how Kauffman’s words coerced him and prevented him from exercising his rights of free speech. It was a difficult assignment, Soglin acknowledged later, because he knew that he “was going to demonstrate regardless of what had been said,” so in that sense his speech was not stifled. But he also felt in danger of being arrested and expelled and felt that Kauffman’s statement had a chilling effect on people before they had done anything, and to that extent it was impinging on their rights.

Soglin rounded up signatures and affidavits from nine other students—Swacker, Henry Haslach, Robert Cohen, William Kaplan, David Goldman, Richard Scheidenhelm, James McFadden, Daniel Bernstein, and William Simons—and borrowed enough money from a woman friend for the filing fee necessary when Julian would take the lawsuit to federal court seeking a restraining order against Kauffman and the university. Also to be named as defendants were the officials who might prosecute the demonstrators, Dane County District Attorney James Boll and Wisconsin Attorney General Bronson LaFollette, as well as the law enforcers who might order their arrests, UW chief Hanson and Madison’s chief of police, Wilbur Emery.

L
ATE ON THE
S
ATURDAY MORNING
of October 14, as Soglin finished rounding up cosigners for the lawsuit, Wilbur Emery received a detailed report from an undercover detective who had been on special assignment monitoring antiwar activists at the university and had spent Friday night at a meeting on campus. The report was a remarkable document of its time, an interpretation of one world by another, written in a language with which Emery was intimately familiar, the formal and convoluted lexicon of policedom, about a student political scene that could not have been more alien to him.

“On 13 Oct between the hours of 7:00 and 12 midnight, I attended a special meeting of an Ad Hoc Committee to Protest Dow Chemical,” the detective’s report began. What followed was a deadpan account of the endless doings in room 5208 of the Social Sciences Building, the meeting for which Peter Bunn had given Bob Swacker the permit. It was a typically intense gathering of student leftists and liberals who agreed about the biggest thing—their opposition to the war in Vietnam—but could talk and quarrel forever about the strategy and tactics of their movement. The Friday night meeting was open to anyone, theoretically, since it was on campus property and the large lecture room had been secured with a temporary permit from the university. But the detective was allowed in and stayed throughout because he was not recognized as a cop. Chief Hanson and Peter Bunn had been invited to the meeting by Swacker, but then disinvited by others once they arrived. They left after dropping off 250 copies of the abstract Kauffman’s team had put together on guidelines for protests in the university buildings. A reporter from the
Daily Cardinal
was also there and remained to the end, taking notes for an article that told essentially the same story as the police account, with more quotes and less chronology.

The officer’s report began by explaining why the ad hoc committee existed. It was a defensive tactic, the agent explained, aimed at averting Kauffman’s preemptive discipline threat. “A number of organization heads—such as the Committee to End the War in Viet Nam, Draft Resistance Union, Young Soc. Alliance etc.—were told by the person in charge of organizations at the Memorial Union that, in lieu of [Kauffman’s] declaration that anyone involved in breaches of UNIV. regulations whether arrested or not would be subject to disciplinary action, it would be advisable for established organizations to
not
carry out any protest actions in the name of any established organizations; rather it was suggested that they form an ad hoc committee en masse to protect their individual organizations from disciplinary action.” So far, understandable enough.

From what the undercover officer “could make out,” the meeting was organized by a leader of Students for a Democratic Society, not someone from YSA (Young Socialist Alliance), as he had previously assumed. There were also representatives from the Committee for Direct Action, the alternative newspaper
Connections,
and three other organizations with which the detective was not familiar. (In fact the largest contingent there was from Paul Soglin’s University Community Action party.) With little contention the group elected a chairman (the vote seemed to be “prearranged,” the detective thought) and agreed on an agenda that called for a four-stage process of presenting and discussing various motions on how to deal with the Dow protest.

When the rules were set, the show began. “The first phase of the meeting boiled down to a confrontation between
P
of SDS and
F
of YSA. (Names in the police report, as in an FBI file, had been blanked out.)
P
made an elaborate speech for the protest against Dow to be OBSTRUCTIVE as well as merely educational.
F,
on the other hand, stated that, although he too had once been in favor of OBSTRUCTIVE picketing of Dow, he had changed his mind since Concerned Black People pulled out of the Dow protest action and now he was in favor of peaceful and educative type demonstrations anti-Dow.”

The second phase of the meeting brought an even more intense debate over obstructive versus peaceful protest. Four young men familiar to the undercover cop dominated the discussion. All four “were in favor of the obstructive method of protesting and while they were haranguing some members it certainly appeared that they would have no trouble getting those members to rapidly pass a motion favoring obstruction.” But it was not that easy. “Had this been the case the meeting might well have been over at 9:30; such was not the case. Sometime between 9
P.M.
and 9:30
P.M.
discussion was cut off and the chairman began the reading of 6 motions which had been written up and handed to him during the preceding discussion period.” The undercover officer explained the motions as best he could.

Motion 1 was from SDS: “The protest against Dow should be obstructive and it should not be limited to Dow but protest should be maintained against any organization which comes to the UNIV. to recruit personnel and which is involved in any way in the war effort.”

Motion 2 came from an unidentified party: “A tribunal should be organized to try Dow for war crimes in the manner in which the Nuremberg Trials tried and condemned [the German industrialist] Krupp. This was not to exclude an acceptance also of obstructive protests against Dow or any other firm.”

Motion 3 was submitted by the fellow named F and his roommate: “1) TUES. October 17, mass unobstructive picketing of Dow, 2) WED. Oct. 18, block all access to the Dow interviewers and act in any way possible to get them off the campus, 3) FRI Oct. 20, everyone go to Washington D.C. and march, 4) have a meeting next week at which time this large group be broken up into cadres of smaller groups which really get to work on organizing radicals.”

Motion 4 was “submitted by
P
and was eventually combined with Motion 1. Its only distinctive mark was the vehemence with which it attacked AMERICA as it now exists. This is probably not new to anyone, but both
F
and
P
are obsessed with eventually leading a Castro type revolution in AMERICA.”

Motion 5 was submitted by “a party unknown and called for both obstructive and non-obstructive picketing not only of Dow but also of Oscar Mayer simultaneously.”

Motion 6 was submitted by the Young Socialist Alliance and called for “a peaceful and educational type demonstration anti-Dow, not because the Young Socialist Alliance is against obstructive methods but merely because, at this time, it was felt more practical to employ non-obstructive methods so as to avoid arrests which might take the wind out of the protest sails.”

If the sextet of motions was confounding to the officer, what happened next was more so. The motions were amended, combined, rejected, tabled, amended again. There was a walkout by some aggrieved parties after a motion was changed by what the policeman agreed seemed to be “devious and sinister means,” then more debate, and finally, when the dust cleared, the group voted to accept motion 3, which was defended by a student so articulate that even the cop was buying into him now, describing him as “a most effective rabble rouser and even a delightful person to listen to.” So here was the plan: No obstruction the first day, obstruction the second, take the buses to Washington for the March on the Pentagon, and then come back and organize. A few minutes before midnight the group elected ten representatives to implement the plan and set up another meeting for Monday evening, October 16.

Five hours earlier, when the meeting had begun, there were about three hundred people present. By the end only a hundred or so remained. “The tenor of this meeting started out very militant, then switched to a rather restrained pitch, but ended on a very militant note,” the officer’s report concluded. “I would suspect, on the basis of what I saw and heard tonight, that some of those involved in the protests on TUES and WED will get themselves arrested and that a number of them intend to go in the building. They are confident that they will have some very large crowds, and it would not take an extremely large crowd to really get the area around the Commerce Building atop Bascom Hill congested.”

W
ILBUR
E
MERY,
the recipient of this report, was from another Madison. He was a straight-arrow retired U.S. Marine Corps major who fought in the Pacific during the Second World War, all spit and polish and shining brass. One of his habits was to order about-faces during random inspections to see if officers had shined the heels of their shoes. Anyone who didn’t shine his heels didn’t wipe his ass, he would say. His men—and they were all men in 1967, all white men—shined their heels. This anal bit of Emery-style logic was perhaps the foulest thing he ever uttered. For a cop and a leatherneck, he had an unusually chaste vocabulary. Smoking was his only obvious vice, but most cops smoked then, and so did the secretaries, the dispatchers, and the police reporters. If his men strayed, he called them in for counseling. Anyone who wanted to get divorced had to explain it to him first. He belonged to Masonic Lodge no. 5 and the Madison Scottish Rite Bodies; he was also a Rotarian, an Elk, recorder of the Zor Shrine, and a trustee of Bethel Lutheran. He was known among his troops as “the pope of the Lutheran Church.”

Like most of his men, Emery was a Madison townie. He came out of the Central High district that encompassed the old ethnic working-class neighborhoods around the Capitol Square and stretched southwest toward the Italian-American Greenbush neighborhood (known as “the Bush”) and beyond to the small black community on the far south side and straight west toward little Lake Wingra and the edge of the west side. There was a Central High connection at the top, an old buddies’ club of captains, lieutenants, and detectives. Most of them, Emery included, went straight from high school into the military, lacking the money or interest to attend the great university nearby. They knew Madison from the street level. One question on the police entrance exam was to name every street that intersected State as it ran from the Capitol down to the university. With so many Central High grads among the brass, it was important for cops working the territory to understand the lifelong connections, which taverns to work and which ones to avoid. If it was owned by Phil Imordino, stay out. Imordino was a pal of Captain George Schiro. Or if the DiSalvos owned it, don’t mess with it. They were “friends of the force.”

That was intuitive for most Madison beat cops. If they grew up there, they knew. But the university subculture was foreign to them. In 1967 the department only recently had begun trying to crack the new worlds of radical politics and free-flowing drugs. One of the first detectives working the campus drug beat was Tom McCarthy, who was thirty-seven that year. He had come onto the force out of East High and the navy with an aggressive attitude and a blunt way of talking that was at once effective and controversial. He prided himself on being “a busy type who did a lot of arresting and pissed people off.” Things “were different then,” he would say of his early years on the force, recalling how he carried a blackjack in a side pocket of his pants, how he once un-pinned his badge to get into a street brawl with a man he thought was “intimidating people” in the Bush, and how he and a group of cops once “dealt with a guy accused of abusing his wife” by heaving the miscreant off a bridge into the Yahara River. A law-and-order version of guerrilla theater.

Word of these off-the-books operations invariably filtered back to Wilbur Emery. Eventually he became so concerned about how McCarthy was “wearing out the rug” on the way to the chief’s office that he arranged to meet with his fiery officer in a police car away from headquarters in the City-County Building. McCarthy’s loose mouth would land him in trouble long before the era of political correctness. When he started the drug beat, he said later, he “didn’t know shit from shinola” about the drug culture and thought it was “the most important thing in the world” to arrest a student for pot possession. One day he was invited to a meeting on campus with Ralph Hanson and Joe Kauffman, who expressed concern about the increasing use of drugs among students.

How do you find the drug crowd?
Kauffman asked.

Easy,
McCarthy said.
You take the student directory, go down to the first Jewish name from New York, and start there.

This comment did not go over well with Joe Kauffman, who responded angrily and later complained to Emery. McCarthy “got in all kinds of trouble,” he said later, even though he was only “being facetious.” Or was he? “To be honest with you, that
was
just about the way it went. Because we had no idea. Most of the kids from New York, to them it was an everyday occurrence. To us it was brand-new.” McCarthy did not work undercover, so he became a known figure around the student haunts, especially the Rathskeller. He came across most of the characters of the student subculture and became especially friendly with Kenny Mate, a rhetorical firebrand who delivered carry-out orders for Ella’s Deli on State Street, and Edward Ben Elson, a brilliant iconoclast who strutted around in bellbottoms and an admiral’s hat and whose own Kafkaesque worldview set him apart from any crowd. Once when a student taunted McCarthy by calling him a pig, Eddie Elson, a former boxer, “coldcocked the guy.”