They Marched Into Sunlight (70 page)

“Of course, being a radical in the music school is not without its dangers,” Pickart noted, citing several ugly incidents. A professor, he said, “threatened to beat up” one student picket, and the school secretary angrily ripped apart a picket sign, and Pickart was accused of being “a dirty communist pig,” and several musicians who played in the university band were called in for a lecture “on the evils of the New York Commies etc. who organized the strike.” Pickart also told Crane of a teaching assistant “who is being brought before a committee” for refusing to take class attendance that day. Pickart himself refused to take attendance in orchestra (he was the orchestra manager, a work-study job for which he was paid), though he did play his cello in that class.

In a university of more than thirty thousand students, the strike call that first day was in numerical terms only minimally successful. There were virtually no pickets and no noticeably greater absentee rates at the engineering and agriculture schools. The boycott was more keenly felt at the College of Letters and Sciences, home to about seventeen thousand students. Statistics kept that day by the office of Dean Leon Epstein indicated that history, philosophy, and sociology—Chancellor Sewell’s old department—were the heaviest hit, and that in all perhaps four thousand students were reported absent, compared to the usual thousand.

Jane Brotman, although she did not carry a picket sign, supported the strike and stayed away from her French literature class, which meant that she was absent for the six-weeks exam. It had been only one day since she had taken her position as a curious bystander outside the Commerce Building and watched the police march in, but it seemed to her that she was now on the way to becoming a different person. She felt a great awakening. There was still something about the way the student leaders looked and presented themselves that turned her off, but she felt open, for the first time, to hearing the antiwar point of view. Before she had trusted in authority and believed that her government and her university would never lie to her. The possibility that her trust had been misplaced now roiled her mind. She “wanted to know more and more and more and couldn’t get enough,” she would say later. Her hunger to learn about politics, power, and foreign policy became insatiable. Dow had “opened the world” to her. Rather than take the French literature exam, Brotman instead sat at her favorite table in the back of the Union Rathskeller and wrote a long letter to her father the dentist in Maplewood, New Jersey. It was, in a sense, her six-weeks essay test. “You tell me that I’m here to STUDY—to stick my head in big fat books but to ignore the world around me,” she began.

Well, there’s a basic principle which you have overlooked, and that is there is more to an education than learning from books.

College is a big investment. For quite a lot less money I could have easily gone to the University of Maryland or another school close to home. I could have read the same books I read here, and for all practical purposes, I could have gotten a decent education there, too. So why did I have to go all the way to the U. of Wisconsin?

One of the major reasons for coming to this campus was due to the great diversification of the student body, and thus to the variations of existing ideas. In other words, I want to learn, I want to weigh every idea, I want to open my eyes to everything so I can make the best possible judgments.

As for today’s incident—I won’t be able to respect myself for not standing up for what I believe in. Would you be able to respect yourself? I know what I saw, and I can’t allow that to happen again. I know you don’t want me to get hurt or involved (I’m not going to get hurt), but I must take a stand. And in this case, my stand coincides with the students involved in the protest….

I want to make something clear: today’s student strike had nothing to do with the left, the right, or the conservatives. It was merely a general consensus of a great deal of the student body in reaction to the police brutality which took place on this campus yesterday. I honestly feel that if you had seen the unwarranted brutality that I witnessed, there would be no doubt in your mind as to the only possible action to take.

There is something else you must realize objectively. I respect your ideas and opinions very highly, for I realize that you have experienced many things during your lifetime. Yet I cannot possibly accept every one of your ideas, goals, or whatever, simply because you feel they are right. I must think about your ideas along with other ideas and evaluate them to the best of my ability. Then, and only then, can I accept or reject an idea (be it yours or someone else’s). For I am a human being, too; I have a head and I want to make use of it. You can’t possibly ask me, or demand, that I believe in something that I don’t. That lies with me. Can you understand what I’m saying, or am I lacking clarity?

In order to operate as a functioning citizen in society, one must question and, if necessary, one must stand up for what he believes in and make himself heard. According to what you believe in, the Germans under Hitler acted in a justifiable manner—they didn’t question and they didn’t stand up to make themselves heard. They accepted something without thinking about it.

Does this mean that I am a liberal? A communist? A left winger? I don’t think so. I would rather think that I am a responsible individual who is ready to grow up, and trying to do so.

I miss you a lot and love you,
Jane

At about the time that Jane Brotman was writing home instead of attending her French literature exam, President Johnson began an hour-long conversation in the Oval Office with Robert Manning, a former State Department public affairs officer who edited
The Atlantic Monthly.
Press Secretary George Christian sat in and took notes.

Manning said his magazine had decided to devote an entire issue to “what’s happening in this country because of Vietnam.”

The president, as recorded in Christian’s notes, said that he could guess the results. “He mentioned a 1951 poll showing that while 81% of the people favored our entry in Korea in June, 66% said in January that we should pull out and only 20% said stay in. The president said this has been the pattern throughout American history, mentioning difficulties in the Revolutionary War, the Mexican War and the Civil War, and the 202 to 202 vote which extended the draft in 1941.”

The thought of an entire magazine issue devoted to the war sent Johnson’s mind spinning in several directions.

He thought about his critics from the left and said: “One of our weaknesses is that every hippie tells us of the evils of war, but we won’t let those who have been there say anything about it.”

He thought about his critics from the right and said they had to be careful not “to get the country on an anticommunist binge” because it would undermine the gains being made in relations with the Soviet Union.

People become inflamed during wartime, LBJ said. As examples, according to Christian’s notes, “he related incidents in World War I involving his father, who helped defend against an oppressive anti-German bill in the Texas legislature, and his uncle, Judge Martin, who was indicted for speaking up for a German in Fredericksburg [Texas] who got drunk and said he hoped that the Kaiser would win.

Manning, picking up on Johnson’s comments about the press’s not listening to “those who have been there,” said his magazine planned to look at “what happens to veterans who come back after being in Vietnam.”

Even that comment took Johnson down a pessimist’s road. He recalled talking to a university administrator who told him that his school “had 21 Marines, 20 of whom were sound men and one was a sorehead. The sorehead got all the attention.”

T
HAT
T
HURSDAY WAS
Norman Lenburg’s second-to-last day of work as a photographer at the
Wisconsin State Journal.
He planned to move from Madison on Saturday to run his father-in-law’s camera shop in Milwaukee. The pictures he had taken of the riot at the Commerce Building would be his last on the job. Two were displayed on the front page of the morning paper: a five-column shot, above the fold, of Madison police officers wading into the crowd on the Commerce plaza, nightsticks held high; and a four-column shot on the bottom left corner that ran with the caption: “Several Students Carry One of Their Injured from Scene of Clash with Police.” Still, Lenburg was “very disappointed” about the play that morning. When he had returned to the office Wednesday night to develop his pictures, he had told the editors the story of being up on the northwest balcony of Bascom Hall late in the day and seeing a young man climb to the roof and cut down the American flag. It was quite a story, Lenburg thought, and he knew he was the only photographer who got the picture.

Now where was it? Not on the front page, nor on page six, where there was almost a full page of pictures. Instead it was back in Section Four, the Madison and Suburban section, displayed in a narrow format. The cutline read: “‘So Proudly It Falls’—An unidentified protester runs from the flagpole atop Bascom Hall Wednesday after cutting down the American flag during the height of the demonstration at the nearby Commerce building on the University campus.” In truth, despite Lenburg’s immediate disappointment about the photo’s position, it mattered little where the picture ran; it was going to be noticed. It was not a great picture by artistic standards; dozens of others more vividly captured the trauma of the confrontation between police and students, but none of those pictures published in the
State Journal, Capital Times,
and
Daily Cardinal
was more noticed than the little two-column shot of the unidentified flag cutter. Soon enough that morning the flood of calls would start pouring in from outraged readers, and the growing fervor would leave Lenburg almost wishing that he had never taken the shot.

At least one reader of the morning paper could identify the flag cutter, of course. Jonathan Stielstra that morning had gone over to
Connections
headquarters at 22 North Henry Street, an old house near campus that had become the epicenter of the New Left in Madison. Someone at the alternative newspaper showed him the picture. Until then he had had no idea that a photographer had caught him in the act. He had assumed that the danger had passed when he had melted into the crowd on the Commerce plaza after that frantic chase down four flights of stairs in Bascom Hall. Now he realized there was a permanent and indisputable record of what he had done. Was he recognizable? Probably. Although the shot was taken from some distance, his face was pointed almost directly at the camera, and his black tennis shoes, mid-length coat, and long blond hair were distinguishing characteristics.
You gotta cut your hair!
someone in the
Connections
office quickly advised him. Vicki Gabriner—the whiteface Miss Sifting and Winnowing and wife of
Connections
editor Bob Gabriner—found a pair of scissors and gave Stielstra a trim. He did not know if the police were looking for him, but in case they were, the haircut might confuse them. He also had a natural ruse. The authorities eventually might determine that the flag cutter was a student named Stielstra, but how would they prove which Stielstra—Jonathan or his identical twin brother, Phil?

The
Connections
office was humming that day. Half the staff had been inside Commerce when the police arrived, and most of the rest had been outside watching. As with all political issues, the reaction to Dow provoked heated debates within the
Connections
crowd. Some supported the strike and saw it as a way to radicalize the student body, but a larger number thought the strike was an ill-conceived and emotional reaction that distracted from the larger issues of the war and the power structure and that it only further separated the campus from the rest of society, where the real battle had to be waged. On one matter the young radicals were unified—their growing anger, edging into hatred, for their liberal elders. The fiercest anger was directed not at LBJ types, domestic liberals who were foreign policy hawks, but at the liberals closer to home, most of whom were against the war themselves, the group represented by Sewell, Harrington, and Kauffman at the university and by the editors of the city’s old progressive paper, the
Capital Times.
These liberals tended to rile the New Left even more than cops with nightsticks or conservative state legislators harrumphing that student demonstrators should be shot. “We were just intolerant of the liberals as they sought to deal with Dow and the war,” Bob Gabriner said later. “They were the enemy. We didn’t spend any time at all on the right wing in Wisconsin. It was the liberals.”

Liberal university administrators, as Gabriner and other
Connections
radicals saw it, were timid and defensive, and their response to the Dow protest was motivated by their need to preserve their own status and power. They were said to be afraid of the legislature, afraid of state industrialists, afraid of wealthy alumni, and were accused of using the notion of academic neutrality to avoid making a moral judgment on the war. “Sifting and winnowing” was nothing more than a hollow phrase that allowed the university to give equal weight to right and wrong. Sewell and Kauffman and liberal faculty members might be against the war, according to a
Connections
editorial, “but they were not ready to resist, and they think they have less to lose by discrediting the antiwar movement itself.” The
Capital Times
was the other target for the radicals. “The
Capital Times
prides itself on being one of the last of the great progressive fearless newspapers in the nation. This is bullshit,” Gabriner wrote in an essay about the press in Madison. Instead, he argued, the paper had become “venomous and confused” by the events of the sixties.

It was all part of what Gabriner portrayed as the liberal fallacy of Madison. “The city of Madison prides itself on its liberality, tolerance and cleanliness. To those middle-aged liberals living in beleaguered little communities surrounded by reaction, Madison appears to be a utopia. Madisonians and the
Capital Times
uphold this image. They like it here. They enjoy battling the forces of the evil right. They can’t do without them, because it reinforces their image of themselves. They are cosmopolitan, moral, and open-minded. The University of Wisconsin is the cornerstone upon which the progressive image was built.” But with the university in crisis because of the Dow events, Gabriner wrote, the
Capital Times
felt “threatened and insecure” and unable to grasp the situation, because “to understand would be to admit that the progressive image is hollow and irrelevant to the crisis which we are confronting.”