5

“Before we talked, now we must act”

Dow

Dow,” as it came to be known by Madison activists and others, was the culmination of the paradoxes of Cold War–era higher education at the University of Wisconsin. Blending together protests against the war in Vietnam, the role of corporations in supplying the American military, and especially the university for its part in the “war machine,” the October 1967 demonstration against Dow Chemical Company’s campus interviews shattered the increasingly fragile peace that had existed since the conclusion of the draft sit-in just over a year earlier. The demonstration included campus and city police forcibly removing hundreds of protesters who were blocking the Dow interviews and then skirmishing for more than two hours with a crowd of perhaps three thousand protesters and onlookers. It represented a full-throttled shift from “protest to resistance” among many in Madison’s New Left, and it introduced a period of late sixties activism that was marked by increasingly confrontational tactics as the war in Vietnam continued to rage into the early 1970s.¹

The contradictions in Cold War–era higher education had been building since the years immediately after World War II, but it was not until the middle and late sixties that they came fully into the open. Cooperation between universities and the federal government that had been haphazard in the years following World War II had become organized and routine, with major universities like Wisconsin steadily increasing their research budgets and deriving more and more of those dollars from an expanding menu of federal agencies, including many with national security interests. Meanwhile, even as universities had taken an increasingly central role in the Cold War struggle, they had also become centers for dissent against American foreign and domestic policy. With the growth of the student movement and the development of a network of student organizations, including journals like Studies on the Left and Radical America (the latter founded in Madison in 1967), there emerged the foundation key to a powerful protest movement. Just as significant, the increasing importance of university education and the flow of federal funds into university coffers underwrote much of the massive expansion of student enrollment in the 1950s and 1960s. By the time that students met to prepare for Dow interviewers to arrive on campus in the fall of 1967, there were thirty-three thousand students in Madison, more than double the enrollment of a decade earlier.

Dow’s manufacture of napalm for the U.S. military was a critical element in the demonstration, but it was only the catalyst for a much broader confrontation over the development of the Cold War university that was at the heart of much of sixties protest. It was the university’s role in the war—”complicity” or even worse, many students argued—that heightened the stakes for this demonstration, raising fundamental issues about the role of the university and the relationship between higher education and the federal government. “The work of the government cannot be separated from the daily operations of American corporations or the university,” announced a leaflet distributed in the days before the demonstration. “To end the war, it is necessary to understand the extent to which major institutions such as this university and Dow Corporation are committed to its continuation. … We pick this week to demonstrate against Dow, against the university as a corporation and against the war because they are all one.” The demonstration enveloped much of the campus, with nearly 40 percent of students claiming afterward that they participated in the original protest or the many activities that took place in its immediate aftermath. For many of those students, the university, the war, and their own role in campus and national politics would never be the same.²

Though the May 1966 draft sit-in ended peacefully, with many students quickly heading home for the summer, the fall semester saw the campus movement pick up where it had left off. With the war in Vietnam escalating rapidly—there would be nearly four hundred thousand U.S. troops in Southeast Asia by the end of 1966 and nearly five hundred thousand a year later—the Madison left gained strength and moved in a number of directions at once. The movement to end the war in Vietnam was at the center of campus radicalism, but students also organized around draft resistance, black rights, the development of a parallel “free university,” the broader Cold War, student housing, and the problems of campus teaching assistants, just to name some of the most prominent. The counterculture also emerged as a recognizable element on campus. Finally, students struggled over the best methods for an effective social movement. As the war escalated and the problems they faced seemed increasingly intractable, students continued to organize pickets, rallies, and marches even as they tried out more confrontational tactics meant to garner attention and compel change.³

That struggle over strategy within the New Left was on particular display at the October 1966 campus appearance of Senator Ted Kennedy, as the tactics of students from the Committee to End the War in Vietnam (CEWV) again set off a campus firestorm. Invited to speak by the UW Young Democrats, Kennedy was in Madison that fall to campaign for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Pat Lucey, but it was his status as the brother of former president John Kennedy and a major figure himself in the Democratic Party that made him a ripe target for antiwar activists. Shouted down by members of CEWV in the audience, he was unable to complete even his opening remarks, but he still managed to gain the upper hand. Relying on his keen political instincts, and with much of the crowd hostile to the antiwar protesters, he invited Robin David, the chairman of CEWV, onto the stage. With David announcing that the only solution to the crisis in Vietnam was immediate withdrawal, Kennedy proceeded to pick apart his position, laying out what he saw as the dangerous repercussions of a unilateral withdrawal and relying on arguments that were still persuasive to the large majority of Americans who supported President Johnson’s policies in Southeast Asia.⁴

Even as Kennedy seemed to many to win the day, the event sparked a campus-wide controversy. Many of the arguments that had surrounded the confrontation with the State Department’s “truth team” in April 1965 were replayed, but this time the stakes were even higher, as the war and the antiwar movement had both escalated, and the disruption of Kennedy’s speech seemed to many on the campus like an especially egregious display of arrogance on the part of the university’s antiwar movement. The Daily Cardinal claimed to speak for the vast majority of the student body when it called CEWV’s action a “disgrace,” and the paper hit the group for its hypocrisy, criticizing the campus left for supporting free speech only when it suited its own purposes. Meanwhile, a campus petition circulated in the days after the Kennedy incident and condemning the actions of CEWV collected a remarkable eight thousand signatures.⁵

The Committee to End the War in Vietnam, for its part, apologized for nothing other than its failure to raise the issue of the war more effectively. In a statement published in the campus paper, the group acknowledged the concerns raised throughout the university but declared that “freedom and democracy have meaning only in a moral context”; it was the federal government, with Kennedy as its representative, that was avoiding a public discussion of the war in Vietnam. Drawing on the New Left principle of participatory democracy, the group claimed that “the essence of democracy lies in the right of the people to discuss and decide upon the issues which determine their destiny. When the nation’s decision-makers attempt to placate the people with jokes and platitudes instead of answering them about their policy, the people’s right to decide is severely limited.” In other words, the group declared, it was their “moral” duty to disrupt Kennedy’s speech. Though some might consider it a violation of free speech, it was necessary in order to hold the federal government accountable and uphold the integrity of genuine democracy.⁶

Finally, the university’s administration weighed in as well, issuing Kennedy an official apology while the faculty adopted a new resolution intended to preserve open discussion on campus. The resolution affirmed the right of students to freedom of speech, peaceable assembly, petition, and association, but it also made explicit that these rights could be exercised only insofar as they did not infringe on the rights of others. Students, the resolution declared, “may support causes by lawful means which do not disrupt the operations of the university, or organizations accorded the use of university facilities.” A relatively generic statement of university policy, it was a starting point for efforts to rein in student protest, efforts that would escalate dramatically in the following year.⁷

As the university wrangled over the reasonable limits to student political activity, protests continued throughout the winter, spring, and summer. The Committee for Direct Action, a small group that engaged in civil disobedience, demonstrated against U.S. Marine recruiters in the campus union building, while a group of Madison students traveled to Milwaukee to protest outside of a military induction center, and another group protested off-campus interviews by recruiters from the CIA (the CIA often conducted its interviews off campus to avoid the kinds of problems that Dow would later encounter). Protesters remained a distinct minority on campus, but even as many students shied away from public participation in the antiwar movement, student opinion itself was beginning to shift. A fall 1965 poll by Harry Sharp, sociology professor and director of the Wisconsin Survey Research Laboratory, found that 72 percent of students favored “U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam” and only 16 percent opposed it. Two years later, however, what had been a decidedly minority opposition to the war had become much more mainstream. In a spring 1967 campus referendum, 30 percent of students favored immediate unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, while only 26 percent agreed that the U.S. should apply “whatever force is necessary for total military victory.”⁸

The protest movement became large and powerful enough that it reached into many areas of campus life, a point highlighted by a “wrong-way” bus lane protest that took place in May 1967. The issue had received some attention throughout the spring, as a main campus thoroughfare had been turned into a one-way street while the city had left a single lane for buses heading in the opposite direction. Students argued that the traffic changes posed a danger to the large number of pedestrians that crossed the street daily, but despite a tragic accident in which a UW student lost her leg after being hit by a bus in the new lane, the university and city were initially unmoved. When a group of students organized a protest, a crowd of two to three thousand showed up, pointing to the growing willingness of students to engage in demonstrations and the increasing strength of campus activists.⁹

The fact that twenty-five students were arrested at the bus lane protest might have been shocking just two or three years earlier, but it was quickly becoming routine. In addition to the bus lane arrests, eleven members of the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union were arrested at the Milwaukee induction center protest the same month, while eight students were arrested in July at a “paint-in,” as students called their painting of a newly built and unpopular campus pedestrian bridge. After the Milwaukee demonstration, some members of the draft resistance group suggested that the arrests had helped to make the protest a “very good confrontation,” while the police, for their part, were in no mood to allow the protest movement to escalate. In the aftermath of the bus lane conflict, Madison Police Chief Wilbur Emery, a veteran of the Marine Corps during World War II, declared that “We won’t let the students run the city. … We’ll crack their heads together if we have to, to protect our citizens.” As happened across the country, it appeared that neither side was willing to give ground; both sides were prepared to escalate their tactics.¹⁰

Finally, the arrests at the summer “paint-in” highlight another important development on the campus left: the counterculture. Prominent throughout the country in the late sixties, the counterculture was a rejection of mainstream American social and cultural values, an exploration of alternatives to traditional institutions, norms, and authority. Young people in particular emphasized the importance of personal freedom and expression, and the counterculture affected every part of American life, from clothing, music, and drugs to politics and sex. In Madison, members of the newly formed Open Arts Society organized the first in a series of “be-ins” in April 1967, following by a few months the first San Francisco be-in and featuring a plentiful dose of flowers, music, balloons, and, as the campus newspaper put it, “love.”¹¹

Of course, Madison had its own tradition of bohemian student culture long before the importation of the “be-in” from San Francisco and the late-sixties emergence of Miffland—Madison’s Mifflin Street neighborhood that resembled a smaller version of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. The Green Lantern, an eating co-operative, was an important hangout for political and cultural radicals in the fifties, and the Rathskeller, located in the university’s Memorial Union and modeled after a traditional German tavern, was a crucial space as well. According to one student, the “Rat,” as it was known, was the “bohemian center,” home to existentialists, hard-core leftists, and not-so-hard-core leftists in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was even at the center of controversy at times, as when Union administrators attempted to transform the space in 1959. The Cardinal’s editors described this effort as “the tangling tentacles of the Organization Men … spreading into one of the few remaining refuges of the individual,” and letters poured into the newspaper over the next few weeks. Some of the letters praised the uniqueness of the Rat, while others called for an end to the predominance of “oddballs” and “radicals.”¹²

Some political groups also had an early countercultural bent. While the communist Labor Youth League was usually focused on traditional political activity during its tenure in the early and middle 1950s, some campus leftists recall that later groups were more “fun.” The Socialist Club and the Student Peace Center, active in the late 1950s and early 1960s, were independent of any national, adult organizations, and this helped give students the freedom to design their own program and mix politics with their youthful energy and creativity. Members of the Student Peace Center, for their part, organized perhaps the major countercultural event of the era, the annual antimilitary balls that began in 1957 and continued for several years. The balls were meant to counter the long tradition of annual military parties on campus, and they attracted hundreds of students and featured music and short plays, including at least two skits written by Madison student and future Woody Allen collaborator Marshall Brickman. According to Ron Radosh, one of his roommates at the time, Brickman was part of the campus left, but not very political; like some, he was more interested in working on the banjo than attending meetings.¹³

What started out as an effort to inject some creativity and even fun into political activity had, by the mid-1960s, developed into a crucial element of sixties culture. What might have been the first avowedly countercultural organization at the UW, the Ad Hoc Committee for Thinking, started in 1965, the brainchild of Stuart Ewen, Robert Gabriner, Russell Jacoby, and Paul Breines (interestingly, three of the four were veterans of the southern civil rights movement). Bound by a “sacred oath of antiauthoritarianism,” they considered themselves akin to cultural pamphleteers, including one that they placed on campus desks: “Your Professor Does Not Really Exist.” A year later, growing interest in the group led to the establishment of Connections, the campus’s first countercultural newspaper and an attempt to blend politics and culture and to experiment with new forms of journalism. Connections would last only two years, but it would be followed by a number of other underground papers in Madison, including Madison Kaleidoscope and Take Over.¹⁴

Most students experienced the counterculture and the New Left as one seamless movement, but at least a few New Left activists questioned its value. In a piece in Connections around the time of the first be-in, student Ronnie Littenberg suggested that be-ins represented a “non-aggression pact with society.” “The be-in is a reaction,” he argued, “not an action; a state of being, not of doing.” While Robert Cohen, a leader of the campus SDS, praised what he saw as the “activist” wing of the hippie movement, sociology graduate student and fiery New Left activist Evan Stark took the opposite tack, declaring later that year that “we can’t build a resistance movement with degenerated hippies … people who believe freedom is all in the mind.” Finally, another student proclaimed in Connections that a philosophy of love, such as the one championed by the campus’s open arts group, was severely limited. Such a philosophy could be beneficial, but it could not stand alone; it needed “political” action to transform it from being an escape valve to an agent of change.¹⁵

Drug use was another part of the counterculture for many. Though drug use was not new in the sixties, there was a marked increase in the number of students who used drugs and the types of drugs with which they experimented. Drugs gained an early public hearing in December 1963, when the Cardinal ran a series of articles on the number of students who had tried marijuana (perhaps hundreds), how much it cost (about $5 for a “nickel bag”), its medical effects (not addictive), as well as police and university efforts to combat it. By the middle and late sixties drugs became a common topic in campus newspapers, while the administration, for its part, became increasingly anxious about the rise in drug use, including what official reports recognized as the worrying spread of LSD and heroin among students.¹⁶

Most students were much more accepting of drug use, but at least a few were concerned about its effect on the New Left. James Hawley, who had been active in New Left campus politics for several years, remarked in early 1966 that marijuana and LSD had become commonplace, and he suggested that pot was used by students to relax, a form of escapism and the result of apathy. The Committee to End the War in Vietnam publicly distanced itself from the campus Open Arts Society in 1967 because of the society’s promotion of pot, while Ronnie Littenberg, the critic of be-ins, argued that drugs reduced users to impotence. At a time when youth needed to be politically active, Littenberg claimed, drugs destroyed critical thought and action. On the other side, however, some students argued that drugs were central to a complete rejection of contemporary American society and culture. In 1967, UW student Arnie Cohn criticized the limited, middle-class mind that was too narrow to understand the benefits of acid. “For the first time,” he suggested of LSD use, “you transcend your little corpsy cell and invade the world of the sensual which has been denied to you since you learned good from bad.” The New Left, or “politicos,” as he called them, wanted to build a better world, but it was really just a new trip, this one with the New Left holding the keys.¹⁷

Despite the minor controversy that it sometimes engendered among students, the counterculture flourished in Madison just as it did in many parts of the nation. Not all students used drugs, grew their hair long, or engaged in casual sex, but the counterculture embodied a rejection of established authority that paralleled the New Left in many ways. Despite the distinction that is sometimes drawn between the counterculture and New Left, between hippies and politicos, the two often blended, and many in the sixties considered them both as part of one broad “movement.” In practice, the counterculture’s rejection of mainstream norms and authority often took on political tones, while political events increasingly incorporated countercultural elements like art, song, and drama. Indeed, at the beginning of the Dow protests in October 1967, it was the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical theater group that had been established several years earlier, that led students up Bascom Hill and toward a confrontation with university officials and police.

Despite the many changes to campus politics and the growth of the New Left from its beginnings in the 1950S and early 1960S, however, few had any idea of what was to come in Madison that fall. The Kennedy incident, the emergence of the counterculture, and the escalating pace of protests were unsettling developments to some, exciting turns to others, but the peaceful resolution of the draft sit-in had convinced many in the university administration that Madison was somehow different. After the sit-in, Chancellor Robben Fleming declared that Wisconsin faculty, students, and administration “have been almost alone among the great universities in our mutual willingness to tolerate strong differences of opinion among us without resorting to the kind of coercion which destroys a free society.” Many believed that the events that had already shaken the University of California, Berkeley, could not happen in Madison, and just a few months before the Dow protests would begin, Wisconsin president Fred Harvey Harrington told the Board of Regents at their June meeting that the UW had been so successful in handling student demonstrations “that many institutions that are having new trouble are coming to us” for advice. Like others around the country, administrators in Madison were unprepared for the escalation of student protest; they had often welcomed the changes that had come to higher education in the previous two decades—the emergence of the Cold War university—and had little idea of what was to come.¹⁸

Like the draft sit-in the year before, it was an ad hoc committee that organized the Dow protests, planning during the several weeks between the beginning of the fall semester and the dates that interviewers from Dow Chemical Company would be on campus: Tuesday, October 17, and Wednesday, October 18, 1967. Ad hoc committees limited the exposure of individual organizations to disciplinary action from the university, but they were also a reflection of the diversity within the Madison New Left, highlighting the rapid growth of campus activism in the middle and late sixties and recognizing that no single group commanded the attention of the entire campus left. Students for a Democratic Society had recently emerged as perhaps the most militant group on campus, replacing the Committee to End the War in Vietnam as the primary antiwar organization, but it was still only one campus group among many.¹⁹

In addition to SDS and CEWV, several other organizations were involved in planning and carrying out the Dow confrontation. Engineers and Scientists for Social Responsibility, the Teaching Assistants Association, and Concerned Law Students were three groups that played no direct role in the demonstration but that debated the issue in September and October and offered various forms of support. And though they were few in number, the involvement of Concerned Black People (which would become the Black People’s Alliance a year or two later) was particularly important for the overwhelmingly white New Left. The group had been established the previous fall and reflected the growth of the Black Power movement in the middle and late sixties, especially the movement’s increasing militancy and its emphasis on blacks controlling their own organizations and institutions. “Future leadership must essentially come from within,” the Madison group announced in its first public statement in late 1966. “The negro has the ability, the rights, and, given the ideals of American society, the duty to assume the forefront in the determination of its future.” The group was involved in a variety of activities related to black rights, including fighting suspected discrimination from the Madison police and organizing a demonstration against Chase Manhattan Bank over the bank’s ties to South Africa. Its involvement in the planning for Dow carried weight because of the iconic status of the civil rights and Black Power movements among many white activists. ²⁰

A final group that emerged in the wake of the draft sit-in to play an important role in Dow was a new campus political party, University Community Action (UCA, first named University Campus Action). The group had some success in campus elections but is most significant in highlighting the controversy over the New Left’s participation in existing political institutions. Many in the New Left, for example, derided the importance of congressional and presidential elections, with some even suggesting that leftists sit out the 1966 reelection of Madison congressman Robert Kastenmeier. According to this view, it didn’t matter that Kastenmeier was one of the most liberal members of Congress; he was too deeply enmeshed in the political system to participate in a genuine reform movement. UCA, however, represented the view that students must engage existing political institutions if they hoped to make change. “The problem,” declared history graduate student Fred Ciporen at an early UCA meeting, “is a problem of power.” Students could not simply demand change, Ciporen argued, but must formulate a program and work within the existing political structure.²¹

Despite skepticism in some parts of the New Left, many students were already working in Democratic Party politics or third-party campaigns outside the campus. Many would be involved, for example, in the Wisconsin Alliance, a socialist political group that was founded in 1968 and organized in Madison and many other parts of the state. Some students even ran for electoral office, most notably Paul Soglin, a member of the campus New Left who would be involved in Dow and who would be elected as a Madison alderman in 1968 and the city’s mayor in 1973. Soglin’s candidacy would also benefit from the recent passage of the twenty-sixth amendment, which lowered the voting age to eighteen and was a response to the fact that many men were being drafted for Vietnam even though they did not have the right to vote. Proposed by Congress in March 1971 and ratified by thirty-eight states in less than four months, the amendment would give young Americans a new means to participate in the political system.²²

More broadly, UCA was part of the development of a “student power” movement. While civil rights, the Vietnam War, and a host of other national and international issues occupied much of the New Left’s attention, many students also targeted their own universities as important American institutions in need of radical change. In addition to such issues as a student-run cooperative bookstore, campus consumer and employee unions, and an end to in loco parentis rules that still governed much of student life, UCA pushed to establish a direct role for students in the educational process. This included areas like curriculum and campus planning, but it also meant a much broader rethinking of the role of the university in society. Specifically, UCA wanted to eliminate classified government research on campus, block campus interviews by companies that made products for the war in Vietnam, and prevent the university from issuing class rank information used by draft boards (an issue still unresolved after the draft sit-in).²³

At its root, UCA represented the New Left’s critique that American universities had drifted from their moorings as sites of independent inquiry, co-opted by their increasingly deep relations with large corporations and the federal government’s national security apparatus. This point was first articulated during the May 1966 draft sit-in, as students questioned the university’s role in the Selective Service System, and it rapidly became conventional wisdom among many on the left. In a handbook distributed by SDS as students arrived on campus in the fall of 1967, just two months before Dow, the group proclaimed that students had no meaningful say “either in broad educational policies or in the formulation of rules that determine where and how they may live at the university.” The university’s “overriding purpose,” the handbook declared, “is not to stimulate independent thought, but to turn out graduates who will have the technical skills and the adaptive personalities needed by large business corporations and the government. It is so committed to the status quo in this country, and so dependent on the approval of those who will employ its graduates, that the needs of these institutions are the basic criteria for decision-making within the university.” Put another way, wrote Russell Jacoby a few months earlier in Connections, “the proper functioning of the university is coercive: it cuts minds to fit the pattern of a society dedicated to suppressing the hopes and desires of free men.”²⁴

This was the contradiction in Cold War–era higher education laid bare. Universities had grown dramatically in the years since World War II, growth that had mirrored their importance to the Cold War struggle and the steadily increasing flow of federal dollars, but they had also become centers of dissent against those same Cold War policies. Indeed, the rapid growth of universities contributed to the development of a powerful protest movement in the sixties; Wisconsin had thirty-three thousand students at the time of Dow, compared to less than nineteen thousand at the beginning of the 1960s, while enrollment at universities and colleges throughout the United States now stood at more than six million, three times the 1951 number. In Madison, the growth was especially evident in the proliferation of political groups on campus as well as the fact that protests often attracted hundreds, and sometimes even thousands, of students.

Moreover, the growth of the campus contributed to the disillusionment with university education in Madison as well as the broader alienation of youth in the sixties. Concerns over the university’s size had surfaced occasionally in earlier years, but they became a regular issue in the middle 1960s. In late 1964, the Student Peace Center drew on the protests then taking place at Berkeley in their criticism of Wisconsin as an increasingly impersonal “multiversity,” while a special university committee chaired by law professor Frank Remington concluded the next year that the growth of the university had led to “a deep sense of frustration and dissatisfaction on the part of some students.” Leon Epstein, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences in the late 1960s, recalls that rapid expansion during these years led to a certain amount of institutional instability, as rapid growth meant a shortage of experienced professors and put a particular strain on undergraduate education. An effort by several key professors to limit campus growth in the mid-1960s again brought the issue into the open, but they were unsuccessful in blunting the university’s continued expansion.²⁵

Connections between the university’s expansion and the growing protest movement were evident for many. While the Remington committee suggested ominously that student frustration and dissatisfaction might result in “unacceptable behaviors,” the Daily Cardinal in 1965 drew a direct line from the university’s size to the rise in activism. The editors recognized the role of the Vietnam War but argued that the most important reason for the growth in activism was students’ reaction against the “bigness” of the university and the transformation of higher education into a process of “mass production.” Activism, the editors argued, “is a striving for a purpose other than sitting in the third seat of the fifteenth row of a lecture hall.” Two years later, in the months preceding Dow, they concluded that higher education in Madison had shifted from its foundations. “The University of Wisconsin,” they wrote, “is becoming a vast service station of the society, replete with high-octane, final-filtered education designed to trap and eliminate the last traces of lead that could clog up the Great Social Machine.”²⁶

In Madison and around the country, students were dissatisfied with the world they were inheriting and prepared to test the boundaries of their power. Writing in the Call, the Madison SDS newsletter, Carol Walton suggested in 1966 that universities’ critical role in the corporate state and students’ position as future workers gave them power, while a campus SDS statement the next year argued that because of the university’s links to other institutions, student activism could “serve as a step toward the democratization of the entire society.” Students also drew on the work of writers like C. Wright Mills, a sociologist and Wisconsin PhD whose 1960 “Letter to the New Left” was circulated widely in activist circles, including a 1961 reprinting in the Madison-based Studies on the Left. While traditional leftist theory had suggested that radicalism would emerge from within the working class, Mills argued that it was intellectuals who would lead the way to radical transformation in America.²⁷

As students arrived on campus for the fall 1967 semester, the decision to protest the Dow interviews, scheduled for October, was obvious. The interviews coincided with protests in Washington, D.C., that were being organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and that would include the effort, led by Abbie Hoffman, to “levitate” the Pentagon. Also, though Dow was not especially well-known for its defense-related products—the company was best recognized at the time as the maker of household products like Saran Wrap—its production of napalm for the U.S. government had already brought it to the attention of antiwar activists across the country. A flammable gel that burned at high temperatures and removed oxygen from the atmosphere, napalm was first produced by Dow for the federal government in 1965, and by 1967 it had received wide press in the United States, symbolizing for many the horrors of the war. For students, its production also represented the broad cooperation between the federal government, American corporations, and higher education. Antiwar protests were often littered with pictures of Vietnamese civilians, especially children, horribly burned by napalm, and Dow had been targeted at university protests around the country beginning in 1966, including a protest at the UW–Milwaukee campus just a week before the events in Madison.²⁸

Despite agreement over the need for a protest, consensus among student activists did not extend much further. There had always been disagreements within the left over what type of action was best, and many of the arguments were replayed in September and early October, complicated by the successes and failures of past protests as well as the question of just what this demonstration should be about. Some students, especially those in the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, wanted to focus specifically on the war, but many others saw the issue more broadly, connecting the war with corporations and universities that were, at the very minimum, complicit with what they considered America’s destructive foreign policy. Other issues also emerged: some students argued that an effective movement needed a stronger organizational and ideological base than the Madison left possessed at the time and that more work was needed to create a strong foundation for the protest, others suggested that Dow was not the best choice if the goal was to maximize the public impact of the demonstration, and still others questioned the usefulness of the various types of protest under discussion. Meeting in the weeks before the middle of October, activists debated, voted, and debated some more.²⁹

As the discussion evolved, some type of action was certain, but a serious divide emerged between those who wanted a more traditional protest—such as pickets, a rally, and a few speakers to draw attention to the issue—and others who wanted to use civil disobedience and physically obstruct the interviews. According to John Coatsworth, a longtime veteran of the campus left and a member of SDS and UCA, it was Robert Cohen and Evan Stark who pushed hardest to obstruct the interviews. Cohen, a philosophy graduate student, had already been arrested several times, most recently at the May bus lane protest, and had long advocated more confrontational tactics, including an unsuccessful effort to transform the draft sit-in into a complete takeover of the university’s Administration Building the year before. Stark, too, had a long history in Madison, going back to the 1964 Sears sit-in and including leadership in the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the Committee on the University and the Draft, and SDS. One member of the campus left suggested that Stark, a sociology graduate student well known for his incendiary speeches, had something of a “Jekyll-Hyde complex”: he would sound quite logical at first, but then he would snap and would seemingly go mad.³⁰

For those who advocated obstruction of Dow, it was time to escalate the antiwar movement. Inspired by the courage of civil rights protesters who had risked their lives for freedom and by the now-famous words of Berkeley activist Mario Savio—”you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”—these students believed that more strident action was needed to bring an end to the war. “Publicity will not stop the war,” a pamphlet distributed in the days before the protest declared. “Both the administration and the faculty know the true nature of Dow and yet they invite it to return. Two years ago, thousands of students demonstrated against class rank. The faculty laughed. … Even on this campus, protest has become a much publicized spectacle without an effect.” Ultimately, the ad hoc committee organizing the protest worked out a compromise of sorts: the protest would be divided into two days, with the first day including a peaceful demonstration against Dow and the second day featuring physical obstruction of the interviewers in Commerce Hall, where the Business School was housed and where the interviews were scheduled to take place.³¹

The stage was set. Groups across the spectrum of the campus left had been organizing for weeks, with many of their plans making front-page news in the campus paper, and hundreds of students were ready for Dow’s arrival in Madison. The university, for its part, said it was ready, too, rejecting efforts to cancel the interviews or move them off campus and promising a crackdown on protests that blocked campus activities. As the protesters described it, and as activists throughout the country reflected on the changes in the New Left in 1967 and 1968, the Dow confrontation represented a shift from “protest to resistance.” It would test the resolve of students committed to ending the war in Vietnam and the lengths to which university administrators and faculty would go to block student protest, and, most importantly, it would highlight the paradoxes of Cold War–era higher education that had been developing for more than two decades and had finally erupted into open confrontation.

The confrontation over Dow Chemical Company interviews in Madison garnered a wide variety of descriptions at the time and since. In its lead the day after, the Cardinal described the event as “a bloody, glass-breaking, club-wielding, tear-gassing battle.” John Cumbler, an undergraduate from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who had worked for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1966 and was a member of the campus Committee for Direct Action, mocked the university’s proud tradition of “sifting and winnowing” in the confrontation’s aftermath. Having been one of the several hundred students inside Commerce Hall when the police entered the building, he proclaimed later in the day that the administration’s decision to eject students had “destroyed the image of the liberal university. The only thing we sifted and winnowed today was blood.” Finally, many of the police officers who had battled with students expressed a conviction that they had done the right thing. “We would like to believe,” a Madison police captain told a Wisconsin State Journal reporter, “we acted, under the circumstances, with tolerance.”³²

The first day of the demonstration, Tuesday, October 17, began and ended peacefully. The events planned that day had been a compromise with students who did not want to physically obstruct Dow, and the first pickets arrived at Commerce Hall about 9:30 a.m. A few students entered the building with signs, but most, perhaps two hundred, remained outside, with more gathering for an anti-Dow rally that continued throughout the afternoon. Robert Cohen and Evan Stark were among the speakers, as was Seymour Kramer, a leader in the Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The steering committee that had organized the demonstration, including representatives from several campus groups, issued a statement claiming that the university should be a target of “revolutionary action” for its role in the “corporate system,” but the day’s events remained peaceful. “It’s just too beautiful of a day for any trouble,” declared Ralph Hanson, the head of the university police force and a likeable figure even among many in Madison’s New Left. “I hope it stays that way.”³³

Whatever Hanson’s hopes, and despite UW administrators’ repeated warnings that students interfering with placement interviews would be subject to university discipline, the second day of the protest included a plan to physically obstruct the interviews. A “too orderly, too sweet, too nice” demonstration would be meaningless, Evan Stark had declared in the days before the obstruction, expressing a feeling that had been building over the past two years. “Four hours of marching around a flower bed at the Madison Capitol Building will satisfy the soul of a Wisconsin ‘Radical,’” John Cumbler had written the year before, “but not save the life of a Vietnamese peasant.” Similarly, another activist, James Rowen, remembers of Dow that “people were getting angrier and angrier and angrier about the war and the draft and the news that they were seeing, the images on television, the level of violence, the body counts, the bombings. It was all mounting.”³⁴

In the days leading up to Dow, groups planning the confrontation distributed at least two leaflets on campus, laying out the rationale for the upcoming demonstration and for the obstructionist tactics. “The alliance between the university and the corporation is clear,” one pamphlet read. “Dow Chemical Corporation manufactures the napalm that burns and maims the people of Vietnam. The university is furnishing the technicians who create the tools of destruction as well as the facilities for hiring these technicians.” Some students disagreed over the specific target of the demonstration—the university, Dow, or the war—but their ultimate rationale linked all three: “we sit in today to prevent the compliance of the university, the corporation, and the student in furthering the crimes of the war in Vietnam.” “We must move from protest to resistance,” read a short note that was distributed on the day that the obstruction was scheduled. “Before, we talked. Now we must act. We must stop what we oppose.”³⁵

On the morning of Wednesday, October 18, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, an experimental theater group that had performed on campus the previous evening, led several hundred students up Bascom Hill and toward Commerce Hall for the protest’s second day. At 10:30, more than one hundred students filed into the building in order to obstruct the scheduled interviews, with more remaining outside to support the action. Over the course of the morning and into the early afternoon, more students gathered, until there were between three and four hundred inside the building, packed into the north-south and east-west corridors that intersected at Commerce Hall’s main entrance. “We were packed in so tightly,” remembers James Rowen, who had just finished his BA and started a master’s program in English, “you literally couldn’t move.” Outside, a crowd of two to three thousand had gathered, some of them supporting the protest inside and some of them merely stopping to watch and witness the drama.³⁶

With the demonstrators effectively preventing Dow representatives from meeting with interested students, and with the protest attracting more students throughout the morning, university officials were quickly faced with a decision on how to respond. Administrators had repeatedly affirmed their policy of holding placement interviews in university facilities and had delivered several warnings to activists in the days leading up to the protest; with these having failed to deter the confrontation, however, they were faced with a decisive moment. Ralph Hanson and his team of university police had been monitoring the situation, and Hanson had requested around noon that protesters leave the building, reminding them once again of the threat of disciplinary action. Stationed in a nearby parking lot were about thirty-five police officers from the city of Madison, outfitted in riot gear but waiting to hear whether their assistance would be requested by university officials and campus police.

The decision on whether and how to use the police that day fell to William Sewell, who had replaced Robben Fleming as the chancellor of the Madison campus that fall and who was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the university, with President Fred Harvey Harrington in charge of the several campuses that made up the University of Wisconsin and out of town on October 18. Before he became chancellor, Sewell had spent twenty years as a well-respected professor of sociology in Madison, but he was stepping into the chancellor’s job at a particularly difficult time. It was even more complicated because Sewell himself, like Fleming before him and like many others in the administration, was opposed to the war in Vietnam. Sewell had experienced the horrors of war firsthand as part of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that studied the effects of American air attacks on the Japanese during World War II, and he had signed his name to a December 1964 faculty petition that called on President Johnson to avoid escalation in Vietnam and to negotiate a withdrawal of American forces. He had also been involved in the Student-Faculty Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the short-lived group that had organized a series of antiwar events in the spring of 1965, including Madison’s first teach-in; at the thousand-person rally that had culminated the week’s events, Sewell was among a group of speakers that included radical historian William Appleman Williams, graduate student and antiwar activist Don Bluestone, and former National Security Council staff member turned Vietnam War critic Marcus Raskin.³⁷

Sewell’s dilemma was also complicated by the events of the last year, events that had taken place under his predecessor but that deeply influenced his own options. Looming particularly large was an earlier protest against Dow Chemical Company, a confrontation in February 1967 that had been carried out by the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and had ended with eighteen student arrests as well as an increasingly resolute faculty. The arrests had taken place over two days, as students wrangled with campus police near the sites of Dow interviews, the initial group of about one hundred students swelling to a few hundred on the second day for a blockade of Chancellor Fleming’s office in Bascom Hall. Student representatives met with Fleming and Dean of Students Joe Kauffman for over four hours in Fleming’s office, but despite threats to prevent the administrators from leaving until they agreed to student demands—cancel placement interviews, drop charges against any students arrested during the demonstration, and open for inspection university records on contracts with the federal government—no agreement was struck, and Fleming made it clear that he would leave his office when he wanted to, which he did. ³⁸

Like many other protests during this era, the February confrontation over Dow interviews created a firestorm of controversy and recrimination over the following days and weeks. A short-lived student group calling itself “We Want No Berkeley Here” brought out eight hundred antiprotesters in the days after the demonstration, while the campus newspaper was full of the usual back and forth over tactics and principles. Declaring that “I do not like to conduct business with students on the basis of arrests,” Chancellor Fleming received wide campus approval for his decision to pay more than a thousand dollars out of his own pocket to bail out jailed students; meanwhile, SDS conducted its own internal discussion on the successes and failures of the confrontation even as the group’s role in the demonstration jeopardized its status as a university-recognized organization.³⁹

Both student and university positions hardened in the aftermath of this first skirmish over Dow. President Harrington appeared before the state legislature in the following days, explaining that “We run a law and order institution. We don’t intend to let things get out of hand,” while the faculty also demonstrated that they were unwilling to tolerate disruptive student protests. Especially important was the faculty’s vote to toughen the so-called “Kennedy incident resolution,” the language that had been passed following the Kennedy protest the previous fall and that sought to guarantee free speech on campus. Despite Fleming’s caution that enforcement might require the use of campus and city police as well as possible additional forces (a caution that turned out to be especially prescient), the faculty voted in the aftermath of the February protests to empower the administration to use whatever measures necessary to protect the continued operation of the university. Interestingly, Sewell was among the small minority of faculty who voted against the toughened stance, suggesting later that universities did not need to act as placement agencies for large corporations. Still, he was overruled, with the decision reverberating during Dow and for the rest of the sixties.⁴⁰

By the time of the second day of Dow protests in October, Sewell was much more hemmed in than Fleming had ever been, caught in, among other things, the contradictions of the Cold War university. On one side, he had an increasingly restive student population, fueled by a deep tradition of dissent over American foreign policy and buoyed by rapidly growing enrollment. On the other, he had the university’s obligations to the corporate world and to state and national governments. These obligations were not new in the decades of the Cold War, but they had grown rapidly with the increasing prominence of higher education in the struggle with the Soviet Union and the deepening financial relationship between the university and the federal government. The university’s regents, for their part, had reacted negatively to Fleming’s decision to post bail for students in February—Sewell recalls that they believed Fleming was “coddling” the students—and they had become much more conservative over the course of the sixties, with several of them appointed after Republican Warren Knowles replaced Democrat John Reynolds as governor in early 1965.⁴¹

Ultimately, Wisconsin administrators believed in the university’s neutrality, and whatever the personal opinions of Sewell and Fleming, they, like other members of the administration, believed these distinct from their responsibilities as university officials. Some faculty voices had argued in March that the university should ban representatives of companies that made war materials, but they were badly overwhelmed by those who believed it was the university’s responsibility to allow any legitimate interviewers on campus. “You can’t block other students from doing what they want to do,” Fleming had said to New Left activists during the February confrontation. “You can’t make a moral decision and force it on others.” Former dean Leon Epstein recalls that faculty and administrators discussed the issue often, and most agreed that it would have been entirely inconsistent if the university had decided to ban some interviewers from campus; the university had always provided a space for unpopular views, including communists and other radicals during the McCarthy years in the 1950s, and it was compelled to do the same for students who wanted to interview with Dow.⁴²

With all of this providing the context for the administration’s decision making that day, the force of about thirty-five Madison police officers not far from Commerce Hall received the call to engage the protesters at about 1:50 p.m. After hours of waiting, including attempted negotiation with student leaders, Chancellor Sewell had come to the conclusion that he no longer had any choice: the building must be cleared. Outfitted in riot gear, and supported by the campus police force, officers planned to start at the main entrance and clear the east-west corridor first, then the north-south corridor, emptying the building and then surrounding it in order to keep students from reentering. This was not the first time that campus and city police had scuffled with protesters, but with perhaps four hundred students inside the building, the outcome was far from clear.⁴³

As officers gave one last warning and then entered the building, they found students in various states. Some went limp as police reached them, others linked arms, and still others fought back in an attempt to keep the police at bay. One of the officers, Keith Hackett, who had grown up in a farming community about forty miles from Madison and had been an army and navy reservist, recalls the process of wading into the halls filled with students: “You either grab somebody, you hit somebody, you knock them down, and you step over them. The line behind you picks that guy up, throws him back to the line behind, who takes him and throws him out the doors.” Some students tried to cover their heads to avoid the worst of the blows from police nightsticks, and James Rowen remembers that he heard a new sound emerging from the commotion, “like somebody breaking watermelons with a baseball bat.” It took the police about ten minutes to clear the east-west corridor before moving on to the north-south hallway; many students were dragged out, some were carried, and a few stumbled out on their own.⁴⁴

Even after students were cleared out of the building, however, the atmosphere of confrontation continued outside, with the area taking on the appearance of a battle scene instead of a university campus. Police moved to form a line around the building to keep students out, while a large crowd, perhaps three thousand, including onlookers, remained. Both sides continued to jostle, police using nightsticks and tear gas to try and push back the crowd, students hurling taunts as well as items like rocks, bricks, and even shoes. Six students who had been among the first hauled out of Commerce Hall were released from a paddy wagon after students surrounded it and let the air out of its tires. Dozens of students made their way to the nearby University Hospital, which also treated thirteen police officers.⁴⁵

As the violent scene unfolded, at least some students and professors appealed to Chancellor Sewell to call off the police. Sewell’s son and daughter-in-law, both UW graduate students, warned him about the coming violence as they witnessed the police first enter Commerce Hall, while at least one group of professors also came to his office. Philosophy professor Haskell Fain remembers that he and other faculty pressed Sewell to pull back and stop the violence, but that Sewell, even as he was practically in tears, responded that there was nothing he could do, that the situation was now being managed by the police. Sewell himself recalled later that he had felt “powerless,” acknowledging that he and other university officials had little idea of what to do in the days before the demonstration and as the confrontation unfolded.⁴⁶

Calm finally did descend on the campus, about two hours after police and protesters had begun skirmishing in the area around Commerce Hall and with tear gas still heavy in the air, but even as the initial struggle was over, Dow’s reverberations had only just begun; they would last for days, months, and even years. Later that night, perhaps five thousand students, faculty, and onlookers met at Library Mall, about a ten-minute walk from Commerce Hall, and though the meeting remained peaceful, police brutality quickly moved to the top of the list of student charges against the university. Three hundred faculty members created a physical ring of protection around the students, many of them voting unofficially to condemn the use of police earlier in the day, while protest leaders called for a student strike in order to shut down the university and force the faculty and administration to deal with student demands. A rally the next morning, with about a thousand students gathered in front of Abraham Lincoln’s statue near the top of Bascom Hill, was followed by pickets throughout the day, appealing to students to support the strike.⁴⁷

Even as students urged a strike, however, the majority of the faculty, even some of those who opposed the police presence that had invaded campus, were in no mood to change university policies, blaming students as much or more than the police for the violence. At a special faculty meeting on Thursday, the day after Dow, professors took an incredible six hours to debate what had happened and how to proceed. “This faculty has already put me in a precarious position in its past actions and here tonight,” Sewell reported near the end of the meeting, referring to the faculty’s earlier passage of the Kennedy incident resolution and with his emotions clearly visible: “You haven’t had guts enough to admit that my reaction [to the sit-in] was an exact interpretation of what you intended.” “This is not a time for weakness,” added Eugene Cameron, geology professor and chair of the powerful University Committee, “but to hold fast to the rules we have adopted for the welfare of all in this community.” Cameron introduced a resolution in support of Sewell, which passed 681 to 375; on their way out, professors had to walk past a silent watch of perhaps two thousand students who had come to monitor the meeting and make their presence felt.⁴⁸

In addition to events on campus, there was also a surge of outrage from outside the university. With Madison police chief Emery defending the violence, claiming that “this was an organized resistance against law and order and we were overpowered, we were backed up to the walls,” the state legislature and the university’s regents had little sympathy for the protesters. “Long haired, greasy pigs” is how state assemblyman Edward Mertz, Democrat from Milwaukee, referred to student protesters, while state senator Leland McParland, Democrat from Cudahy, just south of Milwaukee, suggested that “we should shoot them if necessary. I would. I would because it’s insurrection.” The university’s regents, for their part, had been unhappy with Fleming’s “soft” treatment of protesters, and they now directed their frustration at Sewell. Sewell had called in the police, but the regents reacted negatively to his decision to cancel the Dow interviews after the outbreak of violence and to establish a committee to investigate the issue of campus placement interviews. Sewell would continue as chancellor through the end of the academic year, but it was clear after Dow that he had lost the regents’ confidence.⁴⁹

The Dow confrontation inflamed opinions on all sides and quickly cemented its place as a central event in the era’s already tumultuous history. Though the student strike failed to disrupt the university in any meaningful way, with limited effect outside of the College of Letters and Sciences, activist students were undeterred. Nearly 40 percent of the Wisconsin student body reported in the aftermath that they had been involved with some aspect of Dow, and at least some of them were radicalized by their involvement, many by their outrage at the violence they had witnessed or even the physical blows they had personally received. Writing in the SDS campus newsletter, Paul Buhle, a history graduate student and the founder of Radical America, a journal established in Madison in 1967, declared in Dow’s aftermath that “the student movement as a whole must move from protest to a struggle over control of the university.” The events in the days after Dow, including demonstrations against the police, the faculty, the administration, and the state legislature, were “defensive actions,” protests that failed “because our enemies were not outraged, or shamed, or scared enough to change.” Meanwhile, in a letter published in Connections, one activist argued that “our administration is the henchmen behind the scenes. … What we are really doing is saying no to a world we did not create in the hope that we can find a better and more human place to live.”⁵⁰

More broadly, the Dow confrontation exposed even further the paradoxes of Cold War–era higher education that provided the foundation for so much of sixties protest. For members of SDS, the faculty’s decision to create a committee to review the facts of Dow was just one more example of its lack of independence. “The faculty as a community of scholars,” history graduate student and SDS member James O’Brien wrote mockingly in the weeks after Dow, “has demonstrated its decisive autonomy from extra university corporate power, by doing what those powers want without being told to do so.” Paul Buhle agreed, suggesting that students were the only progressive force in the university and were at their strongest when they relied on themselves and didn’t look to allies like the faculty. For James Rowen, who had been inside Commerce Hall on October 18, it was even simpler. “It just shocked me that the university, as I saw it, had chosen, had taken sides,” Rowen later recalled. “They were with Dow; they were with the war profiteers; they were with weapons makers. You know, they were really part of the war.”⁵¹

The Daily Cardinal, which had often expressed sympathy for the goals of student radicals even as it had criticized their tactics, now offered a full-throated denunciation of the university. While the students had indeed steered a collision course with the administration, the “university has been defined so that the profit motive is our guiding ethic, so that outside interests determine what topics will be researched and studied. The problem is that the administration of this university exerts little or no pressure on professors to teach, but is busy defending the colossal liberal hoax of selling or giving away university facilities to those who support the university financially.” Though the administration believed it was preserving the university’s integrity, the editors argued, it had it backward, as it was the student protesters who were most concerned with the future of the university: “There can be no peace on this campus until the present order is hauled down, taken apart, and built anew.”⁵²

This was the energy behind so much of sixties protest. The clash over the university, a clash that pitted oftentimes liberal faculty and administrators against radicalized students, that grew out of a long tradition of dissent in Madison and in other places, and that was sustained by a rapidly growing student body, was never resolved, but it provided an essential starting ground for much of what we know as “the sixties.” The 1966 draft sit-in and especially the 1967 Dow demonstration exposed the contradictions of Cold War–era higher education, contradictions heightened by the Vietnam War, and these events served as touchstones for the rest of the era in Madison. “Dow” was not the last major confrontation between students and the university, but it was perhaps the most significant, the moment when students offered their most strident challenge to the functioning of the Cold War university. That challenge, whatever its merits, would transform the movement, a pivotal moment in an era that changed America.