They Marched Into Sunlight (71 page)

It was not a pretty fight, this side struggle between radicals and liberals, and it had many unfortunate reverberations for years and decades to come. But it was not one that Miles McMillin, the fifty-four-year-old editor and chief editorial writer of the
Capital Times,
was afraid to confront. Mac, as he was known, part native American from the Menominee tribe, grew up in Green Bay. He was partial to gentlemanly dress, seersucker suits and bowties, yet had a striking presence, bulldog and Hemingwayesque, his shock of graying hair brushed back from a huge forehead, his massive jaws obliterating an ever-present crackling wad of gum, his eyes ablaze, his face set in a scowling smile. He was not a defensive liberal but a fearless one, his positions honed by decades of arguments with critics from left and right. When he arrived in Madison to attend law school in the thirties, after graduating from St. Norbert in DePere, he found himself debating radical organizers on campus and taking his stand with anticommunist progressives. As a reporter and editorial writer in the late forties and early fifties, he led the
Capital Times
’s fight against the red-baiting Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy. Long before McCarthy had emerged as a national figure, McMillin had pegged him as a political charlatan, breaking a story that he had failed to pay taxes on stock income he had earned during World War II.

The hypocrisy of self-righteous ideologues was McMillin’s favorite target. He hated the dogma of received wisdom, whether it came from McCarthy or Stalin or his Catholic church. It was through that historical lens that he filtered the recent events on campus. As Gabriner and the
Connections
writers prepared their next round of antiliberal salvos that day after the Dow protest, McMillin was banging out an editorial that would appear on the top left front of the afternoon paper’s October 19 three-star edition. Appropriating a favorite word of the New Left for his own use, he titled his editorial “The Spectacle of Violence.” His brief was not primarily a lament about police brutality, nor about the Dow Chemical Company, but focused instead on the rights of individuals and groups and the rule of law in a democratic society. It was a classic expression of the liberal dilemma of that era. “The horrible spectacle of violence and brutality on the campus of the University yesterday is the continuing price this country is paying for the reckless deception by which we were thrust into the war in Vietnam,” it began.

It is not easy for students, who are aware of the promises made to this country in the 1964 campaign, to honor the regulations of the University regarding their very natural and laudatory protests at what is going on in Vietnam.

Chancellor Sewell, who deplores the tragic venture in Vietnam as much as any of the protesting students, has outlined this situation as well as it can be done and has warned that the unrest will continue as long as the war does.

But he has also made clear what the University must do to keep operating. The lines for legitimate protest have been carefully delineated. While those lines were observed during the protest on Tuesday there was no serious trouble. The trouble came yesterday when the protesters disrupted the functioning of the University and interfered with the right of the overwhelming majority of the students to pursue their education.

There was no acceptable alternative for the University to the course it took in ordering the disruptive students cleared from the building.

If it had acceded to the demands of this small minority, it would have faced continuing disruption. If Dow can be stopped from interviewing on the campus, Procter and Gamble can because it makes soap for the armed forces.

Could students who object to Negroes or Jews being allowed in the University be permitted to interfere with the functioning of the University to gain their ends?

In a democratic society there are rules—written and unwritten—which must be followed if the free institutions of that society are to endure. They include the right to protest—even against the freedoms which allow those protests. But they do not include the right to interfere with the rights of others without due process of law.

The story of man is the story of the continuing struggle to establish that principle of freedom. It was only recently that the world was engulfed in war to end the challenge of the Nazis to that principle. They believed they had the ultimate truth and could use whatever means available to those ends. The Communists believe that Marx’ holy scripture gives them the same license.

When the principle that the end justifies the means prevails freedom is destroyed.

When it is attempted, as it was by a handful of students yesterday, it results in the kind of violence we all deplore.

When this kind of extremism is resorted to the only winner can be the opposite extremists. The anti-white bigots in the black power movement only strengthen the anti-black bigots in the white power movement. The Antiwar extremists only strengthen the pro-war extremists. If there is any doubt about it, observe the strutting self-righteousness of Sen. Roseleip and his breed since the events of yesterday.

The University has no alternative but to follow the course it has taken if the protesting students do not stay within the rules designed to protect the rights of all.

If there are those either in the student body or faculty who cannot live with those rules, they are free to leave, of course, and seek their education and livelihood elsewhere.

But above all, the University administration must be held accountable to the people of this state to keep the University functioning for the great majority who are here for an education. This requires order. Order should be maintained, whether it is in downtown Madison with the American Legion creating chaos or students on the campus protesting the war.

If it takes the National Guard to do it, let it be the National Guard.

Next to the front-page portion of the editorial was a five-column picture of two riot-helmeted police officers pulling on the arms of Bob Gabriner’s wife, Miss Sifting and Winnowing, as they began dragging her to the paddy wagon.

W
HEN THE SPECIAL MEETING
of the University of Wisconsin faculty began at three thirty that afternoon, the Memorial Union theater was filled to the highest row of the balcony. Professors who could not find seats spilled onto the stage and into a nearby reading room and lobby, where the proceedings were piped over a loudspeaker. According to the minutes, 1,350 of the 1,800 faculty members were present at the start, about the maximum for any meeting where attendance was not mandatory. The lobby and hallway and outside terrace were bubbling with hundreds of students inflamed by the events inside Commerce the day before and the administration’s later announcement that it was suspending thirteen leaders of the Dow demonstration.

Sewell, reentering the fray after hours of isolation at his house, made his way through the unfriendly gauntlet toward the stage. He chose not to preside, giving that job to James Cleary, a vice chancellor, but first opened the meeting with his version of the events that brought them together. He reviewed the chronology of the first Dow protest the previous February, when Robben Fleming was chancellor. Students had blocked the entrance to a building and been arrested. After bailing them out of jail, Fleming had gone to the faculty and gotten a reaffirmation of Chapter 11.02 of the university rules and regulations, prohibiting student protesters from disrupting student functions. Fleming had then declared that the rules would be enforced thereafter even if it took the massive force of outside police. A few weeks later, Faculty Document 122 was approved, reaffirming the right of Dow or any other corporation to use the placement services of the university to interview students seeking jobs. Sewell had voted against that measure, but when he took over as chancellor, he felt obliged to enforce it. He believed above all in following the rules.

Then came Dow II: students announced that they would obstruct, then followed through and obstructed. Sewell’s moment of decision, he said, was when Evan Stark and three protest marshals met with him in Bascom Hall as the sit-down protest was under way next door at Commerce and said that they would try to get the demonstrators to stop if the administration removed Dow from campus and promised in writing that the company would never return. Sewell would not be coerced. “I regret more than I can possibly tell you that it was necessary to bring in outside police,” he explained to the faculty. “At the time, I saw no alternative—other than to surrender. I was given an ultimatum to make a statement in writing. Even so, no assurance was given to me that the demonstrators would leave.”

Everything that followed, Sewell said, filled him with deep remorse—the resistance by the students, the club swinging by the police, the injuries to both students and police, the blood and screaming and tear gas. “Things like this should never happen on this great campus where we have so long had freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful protest.” In his heart Sewell pounded on himself for letting things get out of hand. But in his head, by the logical reasoning of cause and effect, he blamed the protest leaders. “It is my firm conviction that the fault lies with those that refused to cease and desist,” he said, fingering in particular the thirteen students who were being informed that day of their suspensions, pending “full due process” before a university conduct committee. Although the identities of the thirteen had not been released, two names, the most prominent ones, had leaked already at the state capitol. Stark and Cohen were on the list.

Sewell concluded his opening statement by saying that despite the difficulties of the job and his ambivalent feelings about leadership, he would not resign. “I did not seek this office,” he said. “I have no great desire for administrative roles nor for power. I love and respect students. My actions yesterday were taken reluctantly and only to preserve the integrity of the university which I love.”

Eugene Cameron, a professor of geology and Sewell’s successor as chairman of the University Committee, was recognized next, in prearranged sequence, to present a defense of the chancellor. “During the past twenty-four hours we have reached a crisis that is shocking to us all,” Cameron began. “Yet this crisis is no chance, no isolated event. It is a crisis that we should all have expected out of the developments of the past two years. The University Committee has studied the progression toward this crisis, in its various manifestations, since the spring of 1966.” The statement he was about to read, Cameron said, was based on that study and had the unanimous support of his committee.

It was the McMillin thesis, in essence, using some of the editor’s words. “Every human community must have its rules and regulations,” the statement began. The rules can change, slowly, over time, but they must be followed or chaos results. The rules on student obstruction were “not designed to infringe upon the rights of any member of our community, but rather to protect the freedoms of all members, and specifically to protect them from the actions of ruthless minorities who are unconcerned with the rights of others and who attempt to justify their violations of those rights by the specious argument that the end can somehow justify the means. This argument is as old as history, and in perspective history has judged it to be false.” The statement went on to argue that the organizers of the demonstration had to know that they were creating a situation that could turn violent, and because of that they “must bear the onus of the consequences.” These consequences included not only the physical injuries to students and policemen, but also a deeper injury to the dedicated effort of other students and faculty members who had been meeting for several months to work out new policies giving students more power and more meaningful roles in the life of the university. “At a time when these efforts are approaching their culmination, a carefully planned, willful flouting of accepted rules such as yesterday’s affair is a tragedy that is beyond our words.”

Cameron ended by introducing a motion of support for Sewell: “Be it resolved that the faculty upholds the Chancellor’s action in recognizing his obligations to enforce the mandate of the faculty as expressed in Chapter 11 of the University regulations.”

And the debate began. The atmosphere in the theater was electric, tense, heavy with rhetoric and things implicit but unsaid. There were blocs of professors on the right and left who thought Sewell was either too lenient with the students or too easy on the police, but most were somewhere in the middle. They were shaken equally by the sight of riot helmets and nightsticks on campus and by the way that protest leaders had radicalized the academic atmosphere, upsetting the quiet pursuit of knowledge by making everything political. It was as though these faculty members simply wanted the whole unpleasant scene to disappear. Part of the record of what happened at Dow was on film, and several minutes of that film had been provided to the faculty by Blake Kellogg, news director of Channel 27. Should they watch it before taking any substantive votes? The decision was yes, but barely: while 633 voted to see the film, 522 professors opposed the idea, either because their minds were settled already or because they could not bear to revisit the violence. After the film was shown, they took a two-hour dinner break.

I
N
J
APAN BY THEN
it was morning of the next day. Fred Kirkpatrick, the Delta Company point man, was nearing the end of his week’s break from fighting in Vietnam. He left the Club Bohemian in the Shibuya district and checked into the USO club in Tokyo, where he happened to pick up that day’s edition of
Pacific Stars & Stripes.

The front-page headline ran in boldface type:
103 Reds Killed in Triple Attack on U.S. Battalion.
That was enough to grab Kirkpatrick’s attention, and he kept reading. “A communist regiment, heavily manned by North Vietnamese replacements…flare-up of fighting…northwest of Saigon…conservative estimate of 103 Communists killed…eight-hour battle…U.S. losses…56 killed and 63 wounded…”