They Marched Into Sunlight (59 page)

For several minutes more Hanson was stuck at the door. When he asked, once again, to be let out, Cohen told him that he was “part of the society this movement is going to negate” and that if he wanted to leave he should jump out the window. Hanson went to a desk inside and called Kauffman’s office. Sewell got on the line. Things were getting difficult, Hanson said. He needed more officers to keep order. Chief Emery had told him the night before that more Madison policemen would be ready to help out if Hanson needed them, and now he needed them. After talking it over with Kauffman and other aides in the room, Sewell agreed to authorize Hanson’s request for more city cops.

Emery took the call in his office at the City-County Building at 11:30. He had been expecting it. He had thirty officers ready and waiting; some brought in from days off, others yanked from the traffic bureau. Outfitted in riot helmets and cowhide-strapped billy clubs, they shuttled to campus in squad cars. A paddy wagon came along. After finishing his conversation with Emery, Hanson called James Boll, the district attorney for Dane County. Boll, on his way to lunch, suggested that the university chief come downtown and talk to him when he got back, perhaps at 1:30. “I’d like to, but I can’t,” Hanson said, explaining the situation at Commerce. Boll said he would skip lunch and come right up.

T
HE OFFICIAL WORD,
which confirmed Jean Ponder Allen’s intuition the day before, reached El Paso at about that time. Terry Allen was not missing, he was dead. The
Herald-Post
got the news in time to change the lead story in the October 18 city edition. A banner headline declared:

Col. Terry Allen Jr. Killed in Vietnam Battle

AMBUSH MAULS U.S. BATTALION

1st Infantry Officer on Casualty List. Son of

Famous General Decorated for Heroic Deeds

Conseulo Allen and her two sisters were at their grandmother’s house when the car pulled to the curb at Cumberland Circle. The precocious five-year-old, oldest of the three daughters, saw a man walking toward her in dress uniform and thought it was her father. She pushed open the screen door and skipped down the front walk, squealing “Daddy! Daddy!”

The commanding general from Fort Bliss paused, horrified, at the gleeful approach of the unsuspecting girl.

General Allen knew what was coming. His friends had been working the story all night and had already told him that his son was dead. He had gone for a long walk through the streets between his house and Fort Bliss, asking a variation of the question that all parents in that situation ask.
Why my son? Why not me?
And now, as he received formal notification, the old soldier steeled himself one more time.

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” he said, rising from his chair in the living room and walking toward the front hall. “This is the house of an infantryman. There will be no tears.”

T
HE MASS OF PEOPLE
outside Commerce was growing larger by the minute. Some were students who opposed the war and wanted to lend support; many were curious bystanders like Jane Brotman, who made her way east down the sidewalk along Observatory Drive just as the protesters arrived. Brotman, the freshman from New Jersey, thought of herself as “a real anxious person, a worrier,” and now she had reason to be anxious. She was preparing for the first six-weeks exam of her college career, scheduled for the next day, and was heading toward Van Hise for a review session. The subject was French literature, mostly the philosopher Pascal. “Pensées 10: People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.”

With schoolbooks clutched to her chest, Brotman was between the rear of Bascom Hall and the front of Commerce when the sights and sounds of the demonstration brought her to a halt. The drums, the bugles, the whiteface mimes, the Uncle Sam on stilts, the Miss Sifting and Winnowing, the chanting, the tambourines, the scruffy jeans and beards—she had never seen anything like this in her life. As she would put it, this stuff blew her mind.
What is going on here?
she thought to herself. There was nothing like this in South Orange. She was amazed by what she called “the spectacle.” At first she found the whole scene repellent. Yet there was “something compelling and captivating” that kept her there, watching and listening. She decided to stay ten minutes before heading on to class. Ten minutes came and went. She moved around, from the knoll below Bascom to the sidewalk under the Carillon Tower and back across the street to the cement plaza in front of Commerce, and when her review class started, she was still there, watching.

It was an internal struggle, but her will to leave weakened with every passing minute. She rationalized her decision, saying to herself: “I’m going to stay here. I’m not going to class. I’ve been studying all semester. I know this material. I’ll study hard tonight. I’m a good student. I know I’ll do well on the test. I don’t have to go to a review session. I gotta watch this. I can’t leave. It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.” She was still standing on the knoll when the squad cars and a paddy wagon arrived in the parking lot behind her.

Just then a platoon of sociology professors gathered on the eighth floor of the Social Science Building, rode the elevator together down to the lobby, and trooped outside toward the Carillon Tower and Observatory Drive on their way to the Union for their daily communal lunch. Hal Winsborough, the demographer, took one look at the crowd of protesters gathered on the Commerce plaza and said to a colleague, “By God, I’m glad I’m at a well-run university for a change, where people will have the good sense to just leave it alone.” Nothing to worry about, their man Sewell was in charge. The men of methods did not break stride on their way to midday nourishment.

Warren Wade, the curious political science graduate student, decided at about that time to conduct his experiment again by walking into Commerce as if he had an appointment with the Dow recruiter. The east-west hallway was now crammed wall to wall, and many of the protesters had linked arms to form a seemingly impenetrable bulwark. Wade could not get past the front foyer. One of the red-armbanded marshals told him that if he did not want to get involved, he should leave the building.

Paul Soglin and one of his friends then decided to get up, stretch their legs, and take a break from the sit-in. They slipped inside room 103, next to the Dow recruitment room, and found it empty, so they went to the window and stood there talking casually as they took in the scene outside. They were surprised by how the crowd had grown on the plaza; it now numbered over a thousand. And there, in the far right corner of their vision, they noticed a unit of police in riot helmets gathering in the rear parking lot of Bascom Hall. Word quickly filtered out to the corridor. A student marshal started screaming, “The cops are here! The cops are here!”

Jack Cipperly was standing in the hallway shortly after noon as word spread about cops in riot equipment. “With the advent of this news, the attitude of the group appeared to change perceptibly,” the assistant dean later reported. “The women were asked to remove their jewelry and glasses, pull their knees up and lift their coats over the back of their heads.” And the men, Cipperly noted, were instructed to congregate closer to the doorways. One protest leader, Billy Simons, asked Cipperly what was going to happen. Cipperly said he was not sure but would try to find out. He squeezed his way into the business office again to make some phone calls. When he reached a colleague at Kauffman’s office, he offered his opinion that there were “three types of people in the hallway: persons who were trapped between classes, casual observers, and students who clearly intended to demonstrate and obstruct.” An attempt should be made, he said, to “allow those students who did not wish to demonstrate the opportunity to leave the building.”

When he finished this firsthand report, Cipperly turned to one of Hanson’s lieutenants and asked what procedure he expected authorities to use to clear the building. The additional city police who had been called in would probably form a wedge, the lieutenant said, and force the students in the hallway to move outside.
Would nightsticks be used?
Cipperly asked. The officer said he did not think that would be necessary.

Sergeant Kenneth Buss, an eighteen-year Madison police veteran, had been in one of the last squad cars to pull into the Bascom parking lot. The lot was full when Buss’s group arrived, so they ended up parking behind another squad car in an end space. As Buss and his four patrolmen were unloading their helmets and billy clubs from the trunk, Percy Julian, the attorney representing Soglin and other antiwar activists, came by carrying a camera and inquired, “What’s the matter, fellows? You expecting trouble?”

Buss grunted a noncommittal response and marched his troops to the staging area under the Carillon Tower on the far side of Observatory Drive. He and the others carried sidearms and were dressed in their midnight blue uniforms with heavy blouses. They all took off their badges, arguing later that it was for safety purposes, though students suspected that it was so that they could not be identified. Buss had unloaded his pistol and tucked it in his pocket. There were thirty officers gathered under the bell tower, waiting for orders. Most of them were military veterans who came out of the working-class east side, like Buss, or the small towns surrounding Madison, like traffic bureau investigator Al Roehling, a Korean conflict–era veteran who had moved to Madison from Reedsburg. Roehling’s view of Vietnam was uncomplicated: “It was a war and men were getting killed and everybody does their part.” But he wasn’t thinking about the war that day. He was focused on his mission as a cop, preparing himself to do whatever his bosses directed him to do. Who would give the orders?

Chief Emery was on his way to the scene by then, and though Ralph Hanson ostensibly was to be in charge of the combined force, Emery’s men were more inclined to listen to him than to the campus chief. And neither chief was to act without going up the chain of command to Dean Kauffman and Chancellor Sewell, who were huddling nearby in Kauffman’s office. There were already tensions evident within that foursome. When Hanson saw the Madison cops assemble in full riot gear, he walked over and asked whether the helmets and billy clubs were necessary. The riot gear was only for defensive purposes, he was told. As further reassurance, a Madison lieutenant suggested that when and if the police entered the Commerce Building, Hanson could lead the way with his unarmed and unhelmeted university squad. This left Hanson with an uneasy feeling, but he did not press the issue.

Kauffman and Sewell were reacting in very different ways to the pressure as the protest wore on. Sewell was becoming increasingly remote, uncertain, almost paralyzed by a situation from which he saw no decent way out. He could not believe what was happening. Here he was, a man of peace and goodwill, a sociologist who during World War II had studied the effects of incendiary bombs in Japan, and who hated war and had helped set up the first UW teach-in on Vietnam, and who had voted as a faculty member against allowing Dow Chemical Company to recruit on campus, and now his students were obstructing inside Commerce and cops were assembling to go in and clear them out and he was alarmed by the prospect but had no idea how to change the course of events. Kauffman was becoming increasingly strident and hawkish. He was an old JFK man who had first spoken out against the war in 1965, who encouraged students to question authority, who indeed had built his reputation as a college guru who understood the students of the sixties, but this was too much. These students, he now thought, had gone too far. He had always believed in reasonable compromise, but he sensed that the radicals were contemptuous of his very reasonableness. No more accommodation.

“We have to let them go in! “he kept insisting to Sewell, referring to the police. “We have got to let them go in!” Sewell was less eager. He was willing to give the students every last chance to leave.

Hanson shared Sewell’s caution. At one o’clock he entered Commerce again with a cordon of unarmed university officers, leaving the larger Madison contingent outside. He made it as far as the foyer and stood facing the jammed east-west hallway. Stuart Brandes, the tall doctoral student standing atop the bulletin board platform, said that Hanson still presented a “cheerful” demeanor, though when he first tried to speak he was “shouted down” by some of the students. As Hanson stood there, smiling, according to Brandes’s account, the demonstrators broke into a sarcastic round of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Hanson’s voice was soft, he was suffering from a bad head cold, but he finally got a few words in, using his bullhorn. Marshall Shapiro, the news director of WKOW radio, was standing nearby. He heard Hanson declare, again, that the students were breaking university regulations, that this was an unlawful assembly, and that they should leave. But this time Hanson went further. He seemed willing to negotiate. He said he wanted to go down the corridor with his officers to room 104 and escort the Dow recruiter out of the building. Would the students leave if Dow left?

One student, unidentified then and later but heard on tape, started negotiating with the chief. “Hanson, for God’s sake, get the cops out of here,” he said. “You get the cops out of here and stop the Dow interviews and I’ll clear this corridor.” He then put the question to the protesters nearby, those who could hear him. If Dow left and was not allowed back, should the protesters leave? Newsman Shapiro, who tape-recorded the encounter, heard the crowd respond with a resounding “Yes!” He assumed at that moment that the confrontation had been resolved, that “it would all be over.” But other protest leaders were less trusting. Evan Stark, who had been standing further down the corridor, made his way to Hanson and took over the discussion. He said there were two problems. First, Hanson did not have the power to unilaterally cancel the interviews. And second, the goal of the protest was to have Dow barred permanently from campus, not just for that day. Only Sewell and Kauffman had the power to make those decisions, Stark said. He said he would lead a delegation to Kauffman’s office to discuss the issue if Hanson would take his officers out of the building. Hanson agreed, and directed the men who were with him to join the other officers under the Carillon Tower until he returned. Stuart Brandes, the history doctoral student, noted that the effect on the protesters of this possible last-minute resolution was “electrifying.”