Barely three weeks after Iraq`s invasion of Kuwait, as most Americans cheered GIs departing for Saudi Arabia, as George Bush enjoyed sky-high approval ratings and as many anti-war activists were still trying to figure out who the bad guys were, Sam Day acted.
Day chained himself and two colleagues to the front door of Madison`s federal building. Then they hung up a sign that said, ”Building closed until troops return.”
Police quickly unchained the three and arrested them. A judge fined Day $61, which he refused to pay, leading to forfeiture of his driver`s license. With that, one of the nation`s first protests of U.S. military involvement in the Persian Gulf passed without much notice.
”There was some confusion at first because Saddam Hussein had done this thing,” said Day, co-director of Nukewatch, an anti-nuclear public interest research group headquartered here. ”But since Nov. 7, when Bush turned it into an invade-Iraq deal and reservists were called up, the issue is really building steam.”
Just how much steam is not clear. This weekend peace demonstrations are planned in several cities, including Chicago at 12:30 p.m. Saturday at Daley Center Plaza. At noon Friday in Madison, an organization that calls itself the U.S. Out and Now coalition, of which Day is a part, is scheduled to hold a protest march to the Wisconsin capitol. Day, an advocate of civil disobedience to achieve political change, has his chains ready.
On America`s two coasts are several universities whose names summon up, in the minds of many, images of student activism: Berkeley in California, Harvard in Massachusetts and Columbia in New York City.
But in the Midwest, when one thinks of student protests, there is Madison and the University of Wisconsin.
This is a town with a Peace Park, bumper stickers that read, ”No one is free when others are oppressed,” and a long tradition of anti-war activism. It was the Madison campus that commanded the nation`s attention in a terrifying way in 1970, when four student bombers-who came to be known as the ”New Year`s Gang”-destroyed a university research building and a life.
But the recent act of civil disobedience by Day and his two colleagues illustrates a key difference between then and now: In the 1960s and `70s, anti-war activism began on the Wisconsin campus and spread to the town.
Now, the anti-war activity Madison has seen so far-several marches, two
”teach-ins” and weekly vigils outside the state capitol-has originated with old activists like Day who live in town. They are people with roots in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s, and they have been joined by others who in the `70s and `80s marched under the activist banner for a wide variety of social and political causes.
”There`s a cross-generation continuity, stemming from Vietnam. It has saved a lot of time: Young folks don`t have to reinvent the wheel,” said Allen Ruff, a leader of the Gulf Information Group and a member of the U.S. Out and Now coalition. Ruff, a Ph.D. in American history, is a clerk at Madison`s Shakespeare Book Store and a former radio talk-show host.
Some on campus are amazed at the speed with which opposition to the Bush administration policies has formed without a shot being fired.
”My feeling is that what is happening now-the lack of belief (in the administration`s approach to the gulf crisis)-corresponds to what it took 2, 2 1/2 years to reach in the 1960s,” said Joseph Elder, a sociology professor and a Quaker who during the Vietnam War made two trips to Hanoi in an effort to locate missing Americans.
Protest potential
A Nov. 15 poll of about 340 University of Wisconsin students by Frank Farley, an educational psychology professor, indicated that 48 percent of the men and 21 percent of the women supported the United States going to war in the Middle East. More recently, when he asked a class of 400 for a show of hands on the question of how many were ready to protest the U.S. going to war, Farley said close to half raised their hands.
”I think there is very strong potential for protest,” Farley said. ”It is right below the surface.”
For the most part, however, reaction within the university community to the possibility of war in the Persian Gulf has been muted. Student interest in the matter did not seem at all significant until a demonstration on Nov. 16, when an anti-war crowd of about 600 gathered in Madison.
”That rally was fascinating. There were students there I`ve never seen at a rally before,” said Scott Sherman, 22, a senior history major and former editor of the Daily Cardinal, one of two student-run newspapers on the campus. April Rockstead, current editor of the Cardinal, takes a different view.
”Considering the fact that this is one of the largest issues we`ve had to confront recently, I don`t think the response reflects the gravity of the situation,” said Rockstead, whose brother is serving with the Marine Corps in Saudi Arabia.
The Cardinal, she pointed out, has a long anti-interventionist, anti-war history. When police forcibly removed student protesters from the university administration building in 1966, the newspaper`s headline read, ”Fascists in Blue Crack Skulls on Bascom Hill.”
When the U.S. Out and Now coalition holds its weekly organizing meetings at the university, students appear to make up less than half of the two dozen or so people in attendance. At a recent teach-in, a forum titled ”Imperial Swagger: U.S. Intervention and Its Consequences,” the audience contained as many non-students as students.
Michael Barnett, a political science professor, was booed that evening when he remarked that Bush`s initial action in sending troops to Saudi Arabia was a justifiable response to Iraqi aggression and ”not just the same old atavistic impulses.”
Greeted more favorably were local activist Zoltan Grossman, who writes for the Madison Insurgent, and Progressive magazine managing editor Linda Rocawich. Both drew parallels between the current situation and past U.S. military interventions abroad, and expressed distrust of the administration`s stated motives for the Mideast buildup.
Too much rhetoric
Student reaction to the teach-in was mixed. Jack Trudell, a 23-year-old nursing student, was moved to stand and exhort his fellow students: ”It has to be us, getting out on the streets and saying, `We`re not going to die for Exxon. We`re not going to die for Texaco.` ”
But others expressed disappointment with what they described as a politically lopsided presentation long on rhetoric and short on thoughtful analysis.
”What I wanted to hear was more like what I heard from Barnett-analysis,” said Derek Campbell, 19, an undergraduate from Minneapolis who said that most students he talks to in his dormitory favor U.S. military action to force an Iraqi pullout from Kuwait.
”I go to these forums because I want to be opposed to a war in the gulf, but I haven`t developed adequate reasons to be opposed,” he said.
A local minister, Rev. Vern Visick, sees a strong desire among many students to obtain accurate information about the situation in the Mideast. He also notes a reluctance to accept as gospel the opinions of the community`s older activists.
”Some of the old hands get very emotional, and the kids seem to be more level-headed, in most cases,” Visick said.
Economic vs. political
The tendency to draw comparisons between current protests and the anti-war movement of the 1960s is common in Madison.
”At the protest on Nov. 16, I kind of got this itchy `60s feeling. But it seems like it`s something that most people do because it`s a Madison thing, not because it gets anything accomplished,” said Joe Veenstra Jr., 21, an English major from Hampshire, Ill.
Karleton Armstrong, a member of the New Year`s Gang who says he was radicalized by a police beating he took at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, wonders if he would have behaved differently then if he`d been subject to the economic pressures faced by today`s students.
”If you and I were thrust into the same situation they`re in, it`s hard to say how we would react,” said Armstrong, who operates a Madison fruit juice business. He said he now prefers not to get involved in political protests.
Today`s austere economic climate is a factor in tempering students`
reactions to crises like the one in the Persian Gulf that do not affect them directly, said Ralph Hanson, who has directed the university`s security personnel on the Madison campus since the mid-`60s.
”They can`t drop out a semester to play political games the way they could in the `60s,” Hanson said. ”They can`t do anything that will detract from their abilities to compete with the person next to them, who wants the same job. In the `60s, I don`t think young people had that as a major concern.”
Radical is out
Mayor Paul Soglin, who proudly displays a picture of himself in Havana presenting Fidel Castro with a key to Madison, can look out his office window and see some of the streets down which he ran as a student radical at the height of the 1960s anti-war protests.
Soglin was one of those who occupied the university`s commerce building in February 1967, when representatives from Dow Chemical Co. made a campus appearance. He said he vividly remembers the force of a police billy club that day as he rolled into a protective position on the floor.
”I just don`t see demonstrations as significant this time,” Soglin said. ”The politicians, Congress, they`re not waiting to hear from the people. They are questioning our policy in the Persian Gulf, and they are willing to take some risks and initiatives on their own.”
Goerge Vukelich, a local radio personality and columnist for the weekly newspaper Isthmus, agreed. ”There are more avenues open to protest now,”
said Vukelich, who hosted a controversial `60s radio talk show in Madison called ”Vietnam Seminar.”
”You are seeing people on national media, on news and talk shows, questioning the administration`s policy. For the most part, that did not occur until late in the Vietnam War,” Vukelich said. ”I think the country is really serious about this.”
”If there is a draft, it will change everything,” added Gerald Marwell, a sociology professor and a student of American protest movements. ”Then we might really expect something to happen on the campuses.”
Kris Amelong, associate director of the Committee Against Registration and the Draft, with national offices in Madison, said she is preparing to do draft counseling, if the draft is resumed, in Madison`s low-income
neighborhoods. Visick said he already has received calls from young men inquiring about conscientious objector status.
Why are we there?
Meanwhile, students are noticing that some classmates enrolled in the reserves and the National Guard are no longer showing up for classes.
Assistant registrar and military service counselor Larry Lockwood, who is handling withdrawals from school because of military service, estimates that more than 100 student reservists and guardsmen will be gone from the campus by Christmas. ”Each student,” he said, ”has a question: `What`s our goal? Is it gas at 20 cents a gallon?` ”
So Lockwood, a 25th Infantry Division combat veteran who lost a leg in Vietnam, is joining fellow counselors on campus in writing a letter to President Bush.
”We want him to make clear,” Lockwood said, ”the reasons why we`re there.”
