They Marched Into Sunlight (53 page)

Rowen eventually joined the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union and signed a petition saying that he would not serve if drafted, but how exactly he would not serve was something that he and Susan “talked about endlessly” with no resolution. He knew that he was “going to beat the thing one way or another,” but he was also “overwhelmed with guilt” for his privileged status. McGovern broached the idea of escaping to Canada, but he never felt comfortable with that alternative, nor could he see himself going to prison as a draft resister. He was five foot seven and 135 pounds—at his heaviest. His size was considered substantial for a coxswain when he led the UW freshman crew to the 1964 national championship at Lake Onondaga, New York, but it would be of no use in prison, where he feared that he would “last about ten seconds.” In the summer between his junior and senior years, he and Howard Dratch, a friend who followed the same path from Bethesda–Chevy Chase High to Wisconsin, had nearly talked themselves into joining the U.S. Coast Guard, a way to fulfill their service obligation while probably—or so they thought—avoiding Vietnam. At the last moment, though, as they were heading to downtown Washington for the final paperwork, they decided that they were not sailors, that they were not fit for the Coast Guard, and that they were only doing it to beat the draft, so they turned around and came home.

By the fall of 1967 Rowen was waking up every day “angry that the war was still going on” and determined to do something to stop it. At the time, he said later, the “anger seemed so reasonable” that he never “slowed down to analyze it. It was just wake up, feel that anger, get dressed, get to a meeting, get in the streets.” That was his frame of mind early on the morning of October 17 as he and McGovern got into their little red Opal Kadett and drove to campus to participate in the first day of protests against Dow. They had attended many of the organizational meetings of the Ad Hoc Committee to Protest Dow Chemical and had talked about Dow with their friends at night around one of the heavy wooden tables in the Union Rathskeller. These were the two days they had been waiting for all fall. The war was escalating, the draft was escalating, the level of violence was escalating, in America and Vietnam, Dow had been on campus once before, the previous February, and Dow was coming back, and Dow made napalm. Dow and its napalm were not just symbolic targets, Rowen felt, but rather were directly responsible for some of the worst violence of the war.

The issue was not whether they would protest Dow’s presence on campus but how much they were willing to risk in that protest. They argued about whether civil disobedience was “a correct or legitimate tactic,” whether people had the right to obstruct other people’s free access into a building. Some of their friends contended that napalm “wasn’t the right issue” around which to make such a large personal commitment, which might lead to arrest, jail, and possibly expulsion. But finally they decided that they had talked enough, that “the university should not permit itself and its facilities to be used for war-employment recruiting,” and that they would try to stop the process. But not yet, not on this day of peaceful picketing; the civil disobedience could wait one more day.

Paul Soglin, who had run through the same debate with his circle of friends, made his way toward the first day of Dow demonstrations that morning on a far shorter and easier route. From the front bedroom of the apartment he shared with two friends at 123 North Bassett Street, he said good-bye to Che, his reddish mutt, named for the revolutionary guerrilla leader who had been hunted down and killed by the Bolivian Army earlier that month, and walked out the door and down the street toward campus. He followed his daily route, which included a shortcut through the back parking lot of Kroger’s, where a free improvisational breakfast awaited. Every morning between eight and eight thirty the grocery replaced its day-old doughnuts with fresh ones and placed the old doughnuts on a rack in the parking lot. Soglin, a creature of habit, pocketed a few chocolate and honey glazes and moved on, down University Avenue and right across Lake to State, then left toward the Library Mall, the Memorial Union, and up the shaded slope of Bascom Hill, where he would join other antiwar activists picketing outside the Commerce Building.

University officials, having had weeks to prepare, were going over their final plans. William Sewell, the chancellor, had arrived at his office at sunrise and after studying the day’s agenda, decided to survey the protest site before the action. Out the back door of Bascom Hall, down a few steps, right twenty yards, hang a left, and there he was, entering the glass double doors at the front plaza of Commerce at eight o’clock sharp. When he reached the first-floor hallway, an assistant dean of students was already there, reassuring Erwin A. Gaumnitz, an expert in risk management who had been dean of the business school since the Commerce Building opened in 1956, that there would be little risk to manage on this first day. Joe Kauffman, dean of student affairs, was in his Bascom Hall office, reiterating the assignments he had given his task force: Dean Clingan was to serve as negotiator during the demonstrations; Peter Bunn was to be on hand to clarify university rules; Jack Cipperly, known for his rapport with students, would also try to “establish communication” with the protesters; and Ralph Hanson, the university police chief, was responsible for “preventing injury to persons and damage to property.”

Hanson had been up since four, when the alarm went off in his house on Chapel Hill Road off Whitney Way, four blocks from the Beltline on the far west side. The early morning was his time to read poetry and paint. He liked outdoor scenes, favoring birch trees, lilacs, and forest streams, but also tried his hand at portraiture. One of his proudest works was a portrait he had given to Robben Fleming before the former chancellor left Wisconsin for Michigan. “Oil painting is a hobby of mine and I find it relaxing after every demonstration to splash a little paint on canvas,” he wrote to Fleming in a note accompanying the gift. “It keeps me cool! About a year ago, after the kids had taken over the administration building and Bascom, I started this portrait in your likeness. I did not complete it, however, until this spring, as we always seem to have a demonstration, so my painting got interrupted.”

“What’s it all about, Ralphie?” the students would sing. The activists thought of him as a congenial boob, or as a tool of the establishment, certainly not as an artist.

By six in the morning he was shaved, showered, and dressed, in civilian clothes as usual, white shirt, dark suit and tie, a cardinal red baseball cap covering his balding head, no gun, never a gun. He steered his gray unmarked Ford down to the campus cop shop at the corner of Mills and Spring, a dilapidated hut that housed his department, Hanson joked, “because they couldn’t find anything worse.” By eight he was meeting with his twenty officers and ten off-duty cops recruited from the city of Madison, going over the elaborate guidelines he had established for the two days of demonstrations. Since the protest leaders had telegraphed their plans, with an obstructive sit-in scheduled for the second day, this first day of peaceful picketing was viewed as a dress rehearsal of sorts.

University of Wisconsin Campus

The demonstration began at nine thirty at the front of Commerce with twenty “well-groomed picketers,” as the
Capital Times
described them, then grew to a hundred or so and “got progressively rowdier and gruffer.” The number of participants waxed and waned over the next several hours, with late arrivals and people leaving for class. They marched in the autumn sunlight, in a loose loop, chanting rhythmically, “Down with Dow! Down with Dow!” and holding handmade signs.

“Dow’s Malignant, Cut It Out,” read one.

“Who Would Make A Bomb for a Buck? Dow,” read another.

And “Vietnam for the Vietnamese.”

And “Let’s Get Out.”

And “Stop the Bombing.”

A few signs had no words, only pictures of napalm-ravaged Vietnamese civilians. One young man marched holding not a protest sign but his infant son. There was a table where students could sign up to ride the bus to Washington later in the week for the big national protest against the war. No effort was made to prevent students from going inside to be interviewed by Dow. Curly Hendershot, having arrived from the Ivy Inn with the precautionary ham sandwich in his briefcase, was never in danger of being trapped inside room 104, where the placement interviews were conducted.

Shortly before a change of classes at eleven, a squad of picketers entered the front doors of Commerce, turned right, or west, in the east-west hallway, and marched halfway down the corridor until they reached room 104. They did not try to go in, nor did they sit down to obstruct entry, but rather circled quietly inside the narrow hallway. The six police officers who had been stationed inside watched nervously but, in keeping with Chief Hanson’s guidelines, did not interfere with the peaceful protest. With the change of classes the plaza outside Commerce filled with students. Most glanced at the protest and moved on, some paused to watch, some joined in, and others stopped to heckle. There was one minor scuffle, when a few football players “deliberately tore part of a rather long sign held by some of the picketers.”

This caught the attention of protest leader Evan Stark, the entrancingly fluent orator of the movement, who came to the protest conservatively dressed in coat and tie. Stark approached Hanson, who had been monitoring the event from a ridge between Bascom and Commerce, and asked the chief to pull a few of his officers from inside the building to protect the larger group of protesters outside. Hanson knew Stark well from previous episodes, as did all the university officials, and especially Chancellor Sewell. Stark had studied in Sewell’s department, sociology, and had been in one of Sewell’s graduate seminars (which he stopped attending to organize a boycott of the local Sears). Sewell thought of Stark as “the genius behind the whole thing, the planner, the master strategist.” And while he never doubted the authenticity of Stark’s opposition to the Vietnam war, and agreed with him wholeheartedly on that issue, he also thought of him as “the kind of guy that takes advantage of any situation that he can to promote whatever aims he may have at the moment.” When Stark had left Madison earlier that year, the administration had hoped it was for good, only to learn that he had been accepted back for another year of graduate school. A bustle of letters between administrators and deans had accompanied word of his return. “I feel compelled to say,” lamented Dean Kauffman in one note about Stark, “that it is unfair to inflict on some of us the additional burdens of coping with disruptive and destructive behavior for which the admitting departments and the Graduate School accept no burden of responsibility.”

But Stark was back, to be sure. He had come up to Bascom Hall to visit Sewell privately several times in the weeks before the protest, informing the chancellor that there was going to be trouble, that he would do everything he could to prevent it, but that the real problem was Joe Kauffman and the cops, who were conspiring to confront the demonstrators. Whatever reservations Sewell had about his dean of students, they were nothing compared to his skepticism about Evan Stark, of whom he once said, “I wouldn’t trust him any farther than I could throw him.” Stark had his own mixed feelings about Sewell. From a professional standpoint, he considered Sewell “one of the most decent men” in the sociology department, a scholar who made a serious attempt to address big issues but was a “second-rate methodologist.” In political terms he admired Sewell’s “instinctive pacifism” but thought he was overmatched as chancellor.

Chief Hanson responded coyly at first to Stark’s plea for help, saying that Stark would have to be patient, that they “didn’t have a large army of police officers here.” When the break between classes ended, Hanson went inside Commerce, noticed that all was quiet, brought out two officers, and stationed them near the picketers.

Shortly before noon the demonstrators gathered for an hour of speeches. The audience stood on the cement plaza outside Commerce, looking up at a collection of campus speakers on the ridge to the east who were angling for position in front of a bullhorn. Someone held a sign above their heads: From Protest to Resistance. More students stopped to listen, and the throng grew to about four hundred. Soglin, Bob Swacker, Rowen and McGovern, and the Stielstra twins were there, drawn not by the leaders but by the cause, determined to do what they could to end the war. Stark and Bob Cohen claimed their familiar posts among the self-designated speakers, along with their acolytes William Simons and Robert Weiland.

Three poems were read in honor of the fallen Che Guevara. Up stepped sociology professor Maurice Zeitlin, a charismatic young socialist, his hair neatly trimmed, wearing a coat and tie and cool dark shades. It was Zeitlin who had presented the losing motion to the faculty senate the previous spring that attempted to ban corporations with military ties from recruiting on campus. With Stark at his side holding the bullhorn, and with his rhythms mimicking Bobby Kennedy, Zeitlin now said that “we live in a sad time, because it is a time in which as Americans the transparency of our government’s attempts to contain and to crush the aspirations for democracy and social revolution abroad have become so clear. That’s why we meet here. It is the United States government, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, which has intervened, interfered, toppled democratic governments, destroyed democratic and reform administrations and prevented their fulfillment.”