It was a warm spring afternoon on May 16, 1966, the day of the first large-scale confrontation between students and administrators at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Known afterward simply as the “draft sit-in,” the confrontation came on the heels of a failed meeting between university president Fred Harvey Harrington and leaders of a recently formed student group, the Committee on the University and the Draft; with Harrington declaring that he would not give in to their demands, approximately four hundred students conducted a quick vote and then filed into the university’s recently built Administration Building. The university, for its part, did not try to oust the demonstrators from the building. City and campus police remained nearby, but their directions were to take no action as long as the students did not damage property or interfere with university functions. Occupying the first floor of the building, near the campus’s eastern edge, the students would stay for more than seventy-two hours. They busied themselves with speeches, debates, singing, and even studying; those in the building on the first night of the protest watched a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, a Depression-era classic of social protest that parodied the mechanization and dehumanization of modern society.1
Among the many factors that led to the sit-in, a tactic adopted most recently from the civil rights movement, the immediate context was the escalation of the Vietnam War and the increasing threat of the military draft. Building on a long tradition of student activism in Madison, the campus antiwar movement had developed rapidly over the previous year, in response especially to the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam that began in early 1965, while draft protest had emerged even more recently. College students had enjoyed a blanket deferment from the draft system under earlier rules, but President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to double draft calls in July 1965 meant a shift in policy. In early 1966, the Selective Service System adopted a program similar to that from the Korean War, using students’ rank-in-class information and the results of the recently reintroduced Selective Service College Qualification Test to determine which students would retain their deferments and which would be eligible for the draft. As protests emerged on several university campuses around the country, the first test in Madison was scheduled for May 14; a small group of students picketed the test site, while a group of two hundred students met and approved a letter to President Harrington, demanding that the university cease any and all cooperation with the Selective Service System. Specifically, students wanted the administration to stop offering campus space for the draft exams and to end its policy of providing students with rank-in-class information that would be used to determine draft eligibility.2
The student group that led the protest, the Committee on the University and the Draft, was an ad hoc, or impromptu, group formed in the weeks leading up to the protest. Though lacking a formal leadership structure (a more permanent group, the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union, would emerge that fall), organizers included graduate students like Evan Stark (sociology) and Robert Cohen (philosophy) as well as a contingent of undergraduates, many of them history majors, like future investigative journalist and 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman. One prominent argument against the draft was that it was discriminatory; with a deferment system that protected many students from the draft, it threatened to turn the University of Wisconsin into a “sanctuary for middle-class youth,” a bastion of privilege that left blacks and poor whites more vulnerable to the draft. Protesters also argued that grades were a poor criteria on which to base life and death decisions, a point echoed by a number of teaching assistants and professors as well.3
The sit-in revealed student anger at the draft system, but its most pointed target was the university itself, especially its role in facilitating the draft and, by extension, the war in Vietnam. While university officials believed that their actions, including hosting the draft tests and releasing students’ rank-in-class information, did not imply an endorsement of the draft system or the war, dissenting students saw the issue from a much different perspective. A leaflet issued by student protesters accused the university of betraying its ideals by cooperating with the military, while another criticism asserted that the university had essentially become a part of the Selective Service System. With headlines from Vietnam forming the backdrop for the protest—”World Peace Hinges on Viet, LBJ Claims,” “Ky Troops, Tanks Move in on Rebels,” and “Threat of Open Civil War: Fighting Flares in Da Nang” are just a sampling of headlines in one of the city’s daily newspapers during the sit-in—members of the student group drew the connection between what they considered the university’s tacit support for the draft and support for American foreign policy in Vietnam.4
For at least a week, the sit-in held the attention of much of the campus and the city. Though sometimes tempered with ambivalence about the students’ tactics, public support came from a variety of corners, including the usually conservative Inter-Fraternity Council, the Wisconsin Student Association (the university’s student government), a group of fifteen campus clergy members, and Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson, who declared that he was in agreement with the principled concerns raised by the student activists. On the other side were groups like the UW Young Republicans, which passed a resolution condemning the sit-in on a close vote of 21–20, and a campus chapter of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, which proclaimed the sit-in just one more example of “extremist left-wing activity” in Madison. Conservatives in the state legislature, less than a mile down the road from the students ensconced in the Administration Building, unleashed by far the most venom. Republican state senator Gordon Roseleip, a long-time critic of campus activists, claimed that the demonstration was communist controlled, while Republican assemblyman Harold Froehlich drew on long-standing stereotypes of campus protesters when he suggested that a bill to increase out-of-state tuition, then under consideration in the legislature, would decrease the number of “New Yorkers sitting in buildings who should be in class.”5
With no end in sight—the group vowed to continue the demonstration until its demands were met—it was not clear if the uneasy peace between the student activists and university authorities would hold. Both sides were acutely aware of the protests that were slowly spreading through the nation’s campuses, protests first sparked by the University of California, Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in 1964, and some believed that Madison might be the next campus to witness a violent clash. Attempting to defuse the situation, Chancellor Robben Fleming, who led the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin and who would later express some sympathy for the goals of the protesters, if not their tactics, organized a meeting in front of the university’s historic Bascom Hall on Wednesday, two days after the sit-in began. Before a crowd of several thousand, including all but a token force of the protesters who had stayed in the Administration Building, Fleming, President Harrington, and a few student leaders spoke, with Fleming agreeing to one of the protesters’ demands by scheduling a special faculty meeting for the next Monday. Some faculty members also tried their own personal intervention, meeting with students in the Administration Building and urging them not to push the protest too far. Historian William Appleman Williams, known as a strong opponent of the war, told students that they “functioned as the conscience of the university,” but he encouraged them to work on persuading faculty members in order to change university policy. Another sympathetic and well-liked history professor, German-born George Mosse, warned the students of the negative effect that continuing the sit-in would have on faculty opinion.6
The students did ultimately call off the sit-in, but if they were hopeful that the faculty could be persuaded, they would be sorely disappointed. After listening to a number of presentations, including one from a group of students speaking against the protest, the special faculty meeting rejected two separate resolutions that contained sharp indictments of the university’s relationship with the draft and the military, one of them offered by William Appleman Williams on behalf of the student protesters and the other by another professor sympathetic to the protest, historian Harvey Goldberg. Instead, the faculty approved a rather generic statement of concern over the issues raised by the sit-in. While continuing the policies of providing rank-in-class information to students and making available university facilities for draft examinations, the meeting authorized the creation of a student-faculty committee to investigate the university’s relationship to the Selective Service System. Moreover, though a last-minute amendment offered by George Mosse deleted a declaration that the faculty was “unalterably opposed to coercive methods” like those used by the student protesters, it was clear that many at the university were disturbed by the means employed at the sit-in, an issue that would emerge with greater force during future confrontations.7
The draft sit-in never regained momentum after the faculty meeting, with final exams just days away and most students leaving for summer break, but the spotlight that it placed on the university’s cooperation with the draft would resonate throughout the era. Following up on the anger at the university—a reporter for the campus newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, described a gathering of one thousand students after the special faculty meeting as “thick with charges of ‘faculty betrayal’ … [as] speaker after speaker rose to denounce ‘faculty collusion with the military’”—the Committee on the University and the Draft met again in the fall, broadening its focus to include a more general criticism of the university and its functions. Students also met that fall to form the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union, a group that played an active role throughout the rest of the sixties in counseling students and opposing the draft. For their part, the editors of the Cardinal, hardly a bastion of student radicalism in 1966, suggested that the sit-in had raised a number of issues that needed further attention, including the university’s relationship with the federal government. The Cardinal editors could have little idea exactly how much attention this relationship would attract in the years to come, both in Madison and throughout the nation.8
The draft sit-in is not the most remembered of sixties protests at the University of Wisconsin, perhaps because it ended peacefully, but it sits in many ways at the center of the era’s history. In Madison, it represented the strength of the New Left, the movement of mostly young people who put forward a radical challenge to America’s legacy of imperialism, capitalism, and racism. Wisconsin was one of the first campuses in the country to develop a strident student movement, and it was well known throughout the nation for its activism and sometimes its intellectual force. The draft sit-in drew on a long tradition of student protest that pushes backward the beginning of the era that we know as “the sixties,” and the university also brought together a mix of political and intellectual traditions that highlights Madison’s distinctive history. Beginning with the state of Wisconsin’s political culture, born in the early twentieth-century Progressive Era, and including a core of unorthodox faculty members as well as a mix of home-grown Midwest radicals and East Coast Jewish students, the draft sit-in drew on roots much deeper than the recent escalation of the Vietnam War.
Yet even as the University of Wisconsin has its own distinctive history of the sixties, it also points to a broader history of the era, especially the changes that had taken place in American higher education since the end of World War II and the tensions that were beginning to emerge on the nation’s campuses. Like many of the country’s leading universities, Wisconsin had developed increasingly close ties with the federal government in the postwar years, ties that reflected the important place of higher education in the nation’s life and especially the crucial role that universities played in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. Wisconsin was one of many “Cold War universities” that developed during these years, buttressed by a massive influx of federal dollars that helped expand and reshape the campus even as it contributed to the development of a powerful protest movement. This was the contradiction in American higher education that emerged during these years, with universities becoming increasingly central to the Cold War struggle even as they became centers of protest against Cold War policies. The draft sit-in’s focus on the university’s cooperation with the Selective Service System began the process of exposing this contradiction, a task that would be mirrored on campuses across the nation as symbols of universities’ relationship with the federal government, and especially the government’s prosecution of the Vietnam War, came under increasing attack. The war was certainly the essential issue for protesters after its escalation in 1965, but the draft sit-in, and later campus confrontations in Madison, show how an increasingly confrontational strain of protest was focused and fueled by the changes in Cold War–era higher education.9
Wisconsin had developed a reputation for political organization and activism in the first half of the twentieth century, and this tradition carried over into the 1950s as well, belying the popular stereotype of that era’s youth as a “silent generation.” While other leading public universities, like the University of Michigan and the University of California, are well remembered for the deep scars left by McCarthyism, the period of strident anticommunism in the late 1940s and 1950s named after Wisconsin’s own junior senator, Madison students often pushed the boundaries of McCarthy-era consensus. Though much more limited than their 1960s counterparts, several student organizations sustained a liberal and sometimes even radical politics, opposing campus-based ROTC, supporting civil rights, criticizing the excesses of domestic anticommunism, and developing a critique of American foreign policy long before the war in Vietnam exposed rifts in Cold War dogma. In a mark of the particular atmosphere in Madison, the UW was the only university in the nation to have an officially recognized chapter of the Labor Youth League, the youth group of the Communist Party, in the early and middle 1950s. Well before Berkeley’s 1964–65 Free Speech Movement heralded the arrival of a powerful New Left, before young people gathered in Michigan in 1962 to produce the famous “Port Huron Statement,” and even before Students for a Democratic Society, the largest New Left organization, was born in 1960, students in Madison were exploring new directions in radical politics. Studies on the Left, a journal established by Madison students in 1959, was perhaps the most concrete example, and its potent critique of American liberalism and foreign policy would resonate widely throughout the New Left in later years.10
Crucially important to these developments was Madison’s dynamic intellectual and activist culture, one that blended East and Midwest, radical, liberal, and sometimes even conservative. Along with an unorthodox faculty, led by radical historian William Appleman Williams, the mix of students in Madison included an important contingent of out-of-state students, many of them Jews from New York or New Jersey, as well as home-grown Wisconsin and Midwest radicals. Indeed, while Jewish students were attracted to the university because of its national reputation for academic excellence, its historically open admissions policy, and its tradition of political activism, they were often overrepresented in left-leaning student organizations, a pattern that was replicated at many other universities as well. In Madison, that prominence brought regular condemnation of “New Yorkers” and various attempts to limit out-of-state enrollment. Still, Jewish students drew on an ethnic background that included family and community traditions of radical political activism and played a crucial role in campus politics, contributing to the development of new political directions even as they provided a link to the Old Left, the constellation of leftist organizations that existed in the first half of the twentieth century.11
Along with the prominence of Jewish students in the New Left, Wisconsin also had its own unorthodox roots. The state had been at the forefront of the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century, a movement that sought to curb political corruption and limit the power of special interests, and Wisconsin was known throughout the nation as a “laboratory for democracy” for its reformist policies. The state even had its own Progressive icon in Robert LaFollette, a graduate of the UW and Wisconsin governor, senator, and presidential candidate. Even as the reformist zeal faded after World War I, Progressives maintained an important presence in state politics, with brothers Philip LaFollette and Robert LaFollette Jr. continuing to serve in statewide office into the 1930s and 1940s, respectively, sometimes running as members of the Wisconsin Progressive Party and sometimes as reformist Republicans. Moreover, while most Progressives remained committed to capitalism even as they sought to reform it, Milwaukee-area residents, just seventy-five miles east of Madison, elected in 1910 the nation’s first socialist congressman, Victor Berger, as well as the first socialist mayor of a major American city, Emil Seidel. Milwaukee’s socialists were known for their concern with honest government and city services rather than any kind of radical program—”sewer socialists,” they were sometimes called—and played an important role in the city’s politics for several decades. While Victor Berger endured a rocky tenure in the House of Representatives, winning election in 1918 while under indictment for violating the Espionage Act and twice being refused his seat by members of the House, socialists occupied Milwaukee’s mayor’s office from 1916 to 1940 and again from 1948 to 1960.12
This heritage helped establish the University of Wisconsin’s vibrant political culture in the postwar years. Even though public universities were especially susceptible to the era’s hard-blowing political winds, Wisconsin administrators generally avoided the worst excesses of domestic anticommunism in the early years of the Cold War. Postwar university president Edwin Broun (E. B.) Fred joined other leaders of higher education in his opposition to communists on the faculty, but Wisconsin was home to a number of irreverent professors, including Williams, whose scholarly criticism of American foreign policy earned him attention from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, law professor William Rice, a long-time campus defender of civil liberties, historian George Mosse, an expert on European political history, and soils science professor Francis Hole, a Quaker and dedicated pacifist. Fred also fended off efforts to impose a faculty oath in Madison, and he and other Madison administrators generally tolerated radical student activity while keeping the campus open to even the most controversial speakers. Such was the university’s commitment to a relatively open and strident exchange of ideas that Chancellor Fleming would praise students occupying the university’s Administration Building in 1966 for their “disciplined behavior” and would add that students had proved that “the right to protest, which is essential in a democratic society, can be handled in a responsible manner at Wisconsin.”13
Even as the University of Wisconsin has its own distinctive history of the sixties, it was also a part of the significant transformation in American higher education in the decades after World War II, a transformation that would influence the draft sit-in as well as other events around the nation. Universities already played an important part in American life, and they provided especially critical services during the Second World War, but the Cold War pointed to a new role for the nation’s colleges and universities. The Cold War led to changes in the texture of students’ lives—shaping their fears, their language, even their humor—but it left a particularly lasting mark on the relationship between higher education and the federal government, with higher education becoming increasingly vital to America’s technological, economic, and even military strength, all crucial fronts in the struggle with the Soviet Union. Some scholars have suggested that universities became part of a “military-industrial-academic complex,” but whether or not one agrees with this term’s negative overtones, their increasingly close relationship to the nation’s security undoubtedly transformed many of the country’s institutions of higher education, including Wisconsin, into “Cold War universities.” This transformation would have profound implications for the future of university education as well as the course of social activism in the 1960s.14
The most distinct marker of universities’ new role in the Cold War era was the rapid escalation of federal dollars flowing into higher education. Federal monies supported many programs, including area studies, languages, graduate fellowships, and building construction, but the central component of the university-federal government relationship was scientific research. The growth of research funding was especially evident in the several years after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, an event that prompted concern that the United States was falling behind the Russians in science and technology; with funding increasing steadily throughout the early Cold War years, the federal government by the early 1960s was spending more than one billion dollars per year for university research. The majority of funds came from the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission in the immediate postwar years, while these agencies were later joined by the National Science Foundation, established in 1950, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, established in 1958. The National Institutes for Health also become a major supporter of university research, with federal dollars from all these agencies supporting everything from small research projects sponsored by individual professors to centers and institutes that employed a large number of researchers, some of them only marginally connected to the universities that officially housed them.15
Research dollars and other funds went to many universities by the 1960s, but they were especially concentrated in a smaller number of institutions that had long been regarded as the nation’s leading centers of academic research. Several private universities were among this group, including MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, while the leading public universities included the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin. Indeed, Berkeley, Michigan, and Wisconsin had each developed ties with the federal government even before the Cold War, and they were linked as the only three public universities among the fourteen institutions that chartered the Association of American Universities in 1900, an organization committed to both undergraduate education and advanced graduate study and research. Wisconsin usually ranked slightly below Michigan and Berkeley in terms of federal government funding—one 1966 ranking put Michigan first among all universities, Berkeley eighth, and Wisconsin twelfth—but it too saw a massive increase in federal dollars in the first two decades of the Cold War. Total federal support in Madison, from research and other funds, rose thirteenfold during the 1950s, with the trend continuing into the 1960s as well. Between 1960 and 1966, the year of the draft sit-in, federal research spending at Wisconsin increased almost three times, to a total of $24.7 million; this was quite a contrast with the university’s entire research budget fifteen years earlier, which had totaled only $4.2 million, including federal, state, and private monies.16
Yet even as Cold War universities developed at Wisconsin and many other institutions, there emerged a contradiction in American higher education, with universities becoming increasingly central to the Cold War struggle even as they became centers of protest against Cold War policies. Other historians, too, have noted how Cold War research and other ties to the federal government became targets for student protesters in the sixties, a point borne out by Madison’s draft sit-in as well as later campus controversies in Madison and around the nation. Yet it was not only Cold War–related research and other explicit federal government ties that spurred campus protests; the incredible expansion of higher education, much of it underwritten by those same federal dollars, also helped fuel the era’s upheaval. Even as universities struggled with the consequences of federal funds on a number of fronts, including fear of federal control, the increasing emphasis on research, and the fact that some fields benefited more than others from the nation’s new priorities, it was the dramatic growth of campus enrollments that was the most outstanding feature of Cold War–era higher education.17
While any consideration of the increase in the number of students has to take into account the effects of the baby boom as well as the increasing importance of a college degree to successful employment, the expansion of colleges and universities in the 1950s and 1960s was also a significant imperative of the Cold War. If anyone had doubted the importance of higher education to America’s security, the 1958 National Defense Education Act made the connection explicit, and the federal dollars flowing to universities subsidized rapid growth. From 2,102,000 in 1951, the nation’s student population reached 4,145,000 in 1961 and a remarkable 8,949,000 in 1971 (the first baby boomers, born in 1946, did not reach college age until 1964). At the UW, the numbers tell a similar story, with enrollment trending upward from a low of just over thirteen thousand students in 1953 and growing every year through 1969, when there were more than thirty-five thousand students on the Madison campus.18
The increasing number of students did not guarantee a powerful movement based in the nation’s universities and colleges, but as one historian has put it, it helped create the “infrastructure” for the era’s upheaval. Trained in research and steeped in critical inquiry, disillusioned with the increasing scale of university education and convinced that higher education had shifted from its moorings, students on crowded campuses found it easier to organize their generational cohort as the sixties developed. Moreover, the reality of the New Left is that it was always a minority movement, even among university students, and even on notably activist campuses like the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkeley. At campuses like the University of Texas at Austin, Southern Illinois University, and Penn State University, which did not have extensive traditions of student protest and usually possessed a more conservative faculty and administration, the New Left often drew an even smaller percentage of students. There would certainly have been a New Left even if university enrollment had stayed constant through the early decades of the Cold War, but burgeoning student populations, made possible to a significant degree by the influx of federal government support, amplified the voice of student radicals. In Madison, where the student population at the time of the 1966 draft sit-in was more than double its low in 1953, the rapid increase made it possible to gather four hundred students to occupy the Administration Building, a thousand students for an hours-long late-night meeting, and several thousand for a Bascom Hill gathering. These numbers would help establish the New Left as a powerful movement in America’s social, cultural, and political history.19
The following chapters trace the history of the sixties in Madison. Although the great clashes of the middle and late sixties generated the most headlines at the time and command particular attention in most histories written about the era, including an entire collection of books on 1968 in particular, the first three chapters emphasize the importance of the early postwar years in the beginnings of the New Left. Starting with the dramatic changes at the University of Wisconsin and in higher education more generally in the early years of the Cold War, additional topics include the liberal and leftist student organizations that survived and sometimes even thrived during the McCarthy era as well as the emergence of a vital intellectual culture in the 1950s and early 1960s. The final three chapters trace the development of a more activist movement on Madison’s campus in the 1960s, including the influence of the civil rights movement, the beginning of the antiwar movement, the climactic protest against the university and representatives of Dow Chemical Company in 1967, and the many directions that the movement took in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The final chapters also trace some of the challenges the New Left faced as well as the emergence of a conservative student movement, a development that would have increasing significance at the end of the sixties and into the following decades.20
Ultimately, Madison offers a window into the history of a compelling period in America’s past. Though some have argued that the New Left did not leave the same kind of institutional legacy as the development of modern conservatism, which has dominated much of American politics in the last few decades, the campus movements of the sixties were part of a fundamental shift in the nation’s cultural and social footing, one that stretches from race and gender relations to the emergence of a powerful environmental movement and the expansion of democracy to politically marginalized groups. Madison was a center of the political and cultural activism that helped establish this shift, a key in the emergence and development of a New Left that would present a powerful challenge to Cold War orthodoxy. Rooted in the contradiction of Cold War universities and heightened and exposed by the war in Vietnam, the New Left would leave an immediate and significant mark on American history even as it continues to reverberate in our own time.