They Marched Into Sunlight (16 page)

J
ANE
B
ETH
B
ROTMAN
followed a well-worn path to Madison. She was one of 124 New Jersey residents and among seven students from her high school who came out to Wisconsin that fall. It was a great relief to her to escape what she called the “phony, very materialistic values” of South Orange. The consumer culture of her upper-middle-class youth had left her feeling alienated, bored, depressed. Everybody in her suburb, she thought, “even though they could be very wise, very sophisticated, they all seemed to be into that whole thing of status, the fancy house, the car—it seemed to be the high school stuff.” She disliked the vapidness of a social life that revolved around Crestmont Country Club, a stifling place that served as the model for much of Philip Roth’s writing about the New Jersey country club set. She longed for a sense of community that she had felt only once in her life, during the summer of 1965 when she was studying Spanish and living with a family in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The “unbelievably natural sense of community there, the organic connections between people” came as an “emotional shock.” Her response was more intuitive than intellectual, and she was not sure what to make of it beyond a realization that life could in fact be different. It had not occurred to her until then that “one could arrange society in a different way and, if one had different values, different social arrangements were possible.” She yearned somehow to replicate that sense of community.

On the way to Madison, shortly after her plane lifted from the runway in Newark, Brotman was overtaken by anxiety. The expectations of the society in which she was reared were that she would find a husband in college but not necessarily her own autonomy. She knew what she was leaving, and was glad to be leaving it, but had no idea where she was headed. “I remember being on the plane and all of a sudden feeling the reality of what was happening,” she said later. “The denial completely melted away and the reality set in of actually leaving home and going off on my own to this place I had no connection with—and I was really scared, really scared. I wanted to get off the plane.” Her first environment in Madison, for better or worse, was in one sense not all that different from what she had left behind. She lived in the Towers, a plush high-rise at the corner of State and Frances whose dining room served prime rib sliced to your chosen thickness. Each of the University of Wisconsin’s private dormitories had its own traditions and subculture. Allen Hall attracted kids from Chicago and Michigan. Chadbourne Hall had the most Wisconsin women. The Towers was predominantly Jewish, East Coast, upper middle class. One of Jane’s suitemates was also from her high school. Another, from nearby West Orange, was the step-daughter of a man who played golf with Dr. Allen Brotman, Jane’s father, at Crestmont. Two more Columbia High graduates lived on the same floor.

These reminders of her past troubled Brotman at first (“I thought, ‘I can’t believe this—I come all the way out here and I can’t get away!’”), but she soon discovered that the Wisconsin campus was so big that she would never feel trapped with the New Jersey crowd. She was on her own most of the day, then made a point of returning to suite 405A around nine most nights, when she and many of the other first-year women would sit around on their beds and talk. She found her own comforting hideaways, a study room at the Memorial Library, a table near the back windows of the Memorial Union’s Rathskeller looking out at the terrace and Lake Mendota. And she found it surprisingly easy to ditch the last remnants of the consumer culture of South Orange. She had arrived in Madison with a trunkful of sweater and skirt outfits that she and her mother had bought late in the summer at Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor. “So I came out here and the first thing I saw was nobody wore these clothes. Everybody wore jeans,” she recalled. “And it was like a wonderful relief. And I never wore those clothes. Never, never wore them. And it was such a wonderful feeling, a feeling of freedom, of letting that stuff go.”

The beer culture of Madison puzzled her. Wisconsin was consistently ranked as the top beer-drinking school in the Big Ten, yet Brotman never had a glass of beer there and did not know anyone who drank heavily. Beer seemed more for in-state kids, the fraternity and sorority types, and students on the lower end of the academic scale, she thought. She had smoked dope once in high school, while visiting a cousin in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and felt no qualms about trying it in Madison, first at parties, then later in the year with some floormates at the Towers. They would open the windows, burn incense, and put a towel under the door to keep the telltale sweet odor from giving them away. Grass had unpredictable effects on her, sometimes easing her mind, other times inducing anxiety attacks, so she did not smoke it regularly. Nor did she consider herself part of any larger movement. She was not a counterculture hippie or a radical, and in fact found that the people who seemed most alienated from the materialistic culture were the ones who frightened her the most, especially political activists who criticized the American government. She believed that the United States was “a wonderful country that always was in the right when it did things around the world.”

When she encountered people on campus “who looked and acted the part of antiwar demonstrators,” they turned her off. She could not open herself emotionally to listen to anything they had to say. She classified them as “weird, strange, different, bad.” Just the sight of them had a visceral negative effect on her. When she made her way through the Union on the way to the back table in the “Rat,” she walked swiftly, eyes straight ahead, past the rows of political tables in the front hallway. Leaflets on the military draft, broadsheets on the Young Socialists, literature on the economic imperatives of American foreign policy—Jane Brotman “looked askance” at all of it. “If you looked at a table like that, it felt subversive,” she said later, describing her state of mind in the fall of 1967. “Dangerous things could happen to you. You don’t go near those people.”

The sorority scene upset her even more. Caught between two distasteful worlds, she responded by pouring all of her attention into her schoolwork. She was taking French 221 and Spanish 221, two advanced classes that focused on literature, as well as gym, English, and sociology. In the first month she never missed a class and found her way to every review session, retracing the same daily path between the Towers, the library, up Bascom Hill to Van Hise for her language classes, then back down to the Rathskeller and the library and home. As much as she studied, the thought of taking her first set of six-weeks exams filled her with anxiety.

The tests were in the third week of October.

Chapter 7

Soglin’s Thrill

T
HE LEAD EDITORIAL
in the
Daily Cardinal
of September 28 discussed the meaning of student power, which the newspaper said should involve more than “the relatively insignificant question of when to come home at night.” Across from that on the opinion page was a poem portraying the University of Wisconsin as the college of big shoulders, an attempt at satire for which no apology to Carl Sand-burg could have been sufficient. And down in the lower right-hand corner was the latest “Thursday’s Line” column by a graduate student in history named Paul Soglin. It ran under the headline “Hi there, Badger!” and here is how it began:

We’d like to welcome back all the students who managed to show up for the 1967–68 academic year. Through the cooperation of university officials, the city of Madison and those pursuing a suicidal course in Southeast Asia, we have scheduled another smashing calendar of events for this year. The 1967–68 year by all indications promises to be the most fun-filled, action-packed school year since university President Twombly suggested that coeds be admitted. (That was the year of the locust.) There will be more demonstrations, more cops (and bigger, though not necessarily better), higher prices, colder weather, and more bullshit from both ends of State Street.

Paul Soglin, at age twenty-two, was not yet a recognized figure on campus and went completely unnoticed in Madison at large, but he seemed determined to make a political name for himself. With his curl of unkempt black hair, mesmerizing nasal voice, and a boyish face that made him look more like a disheveled high school prankster than a bohemian grad student, he gamboled around campus in blue jeans and a sheepskin coat, pulsating with energy and self-assurance, looking for action. He had been in town five years, arriving as a freshman in 1962, and as his activism increased year by year, he watched contemporaries on the left turn away from traditional paths to power. Many of them had rejected electoral politics, preferring to organize, protest, experiment, and, in the vernacular of the era, “build a movement.” Their latest intellectual forum was
Connections,
a twelve-page alternative newspaper overflowing with avant-garde poetry, radical politics, provocative illustrations, and dense, difficult prose. Soglin instead wrote for the
Cardinal,
which was more attuned to the average student, essentially mainstream and liberal, with a milder form of youthful rebellion, and his rhetoric was more easily understood as well. It is safe to say that such phrases as “action-packed” and “fun-filled,” even when offered in satire, were not part of the patois of the Marcusian philosophers and movement activists at
Connections.

While Soglin also believed in organizing, protesting, and experimenting, he was a pragmatist who could not reject entirely the established political system, for it was within that system that he envisioned his own rise. He had been elected to the student senate on the antiwar University Community Action party ticket from District VI, an off-campus district where few others, especially graduate students, seemed interested in such insular campus affairs. Also the only one of six UCA candidates elected as a delegate to the National Student Association, he attended many of its national congresses, returning each time enthralled by the political intrigue. And now, quietly, he had begun plotting a bold electoral move that might take him beyond the university environment. After analyzing voting patterns block by block in a downtown ward where many students lived but tended not to vote, he thought he saw a means of winning a seat on the Madison city council. That election was a year away. Until then there was work to be done on campus, although, as he wrote in his column, it was not typical schoolwork.

It will be difficult for the student to attend all of this year’s functions and still keep up with his classwork. The question he is going to have to ask himself is whether or not he wants a University of Wisconsin education or a real education. For those dedicated to the pursuit of trivia, dedicated to being spoon-fed, and not interested in an education that is relevant to what’s happening, they will find happiness and bliss in the classroom. For those of us who are here to learn we will be out talking about the war, the shortage of adequate housing, secret research on campus, and the meaning of an education.

When a history professor talks about the effects of chemical and biological warfare on the nation developing the weapons, when a chemistry instructor discusses the moral responsibilities of the profession, and when a university administration will explain the limits of education in an institution that is dependent on the federal government and large corporations for financial support, then we can return to the classroom and learn.

Soglin and many of his contemporaries felt something in the air that fall, their lives, politics, and culture racing toward a place unsettled. The anticipation of this new world had intensified the previous spring, when vociferous protests against the war in Vietnam merged with a celebratory be-in at Picnic Point (Allen Ginsberg and the Fugs were there) and a mass demonstration against a wrong-way city bus lane on University Avenue. The civil rights movement had exploded in another direction, toward black power and riots in the urban streets, pushing away young white activists who had devoted years to that cause. Boston, Tampa, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Newark, Plainfield, Detroit, Toledo, Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Providence, Wichita—all exploded with racial upheaval during the summer of 1967. Many students who had headed south to organize voter registration drives at the end of school years earlier in the decade stayed north to canvass suburban neighborhoods in an antiwar effort called Vietnam Summer. Others piled into their cars and drove cross country to San Francisco to partake in the hippie subculture’s Summer of Love, diametrically different choices that nonetheless seemed part of the same sensibility that old ways had been rejected and something new had to be tried.

There was a sense that nothing seemed impossible, good or bad. The cultural revolution was starting to prevail—wear what you want to wear and say what you want to say—and the political scene was taking on an exhilarating if dangerous electrical charge. All summer long a rumor had spread through the left in Madison that the government was secretly planning to round up antiwar radicals and pen them in army camps. Some thought that this meant the old order was losing its grip. Soglin and his allies in the University Community Action party, including his cochair, Bob Swacker, believed, as Swacker put it, that “the establishment had its tail between its legs and was running in every direction.”

At summer’s end, just before most fall terms started on American campuses, hundreds of diverse progressive and radical organizations, including the Madison chapter of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, had assembled at the Palmer House in Chicago for the first National Conference for a New Politics. Peace movement historian Charles DeBenedetti later called it “the largest gathering of the American Left since the 1948 Progressive party convention.” It turned out to be a raucous, contentious, exhausting convention, rife with walkouts, power plays, and endless posturing to see who among the three thousand delegates could look toughest. Splits became evident then that would grow into chasms in later years and decades. The issue of Vietnam was almost lost amid resolutions condemning Zionism and disparaging the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War, actions that prompted some left-leaning Jewish intellectuals to begin the turn toward neoliberalism or neoconservatism. There was also a demand by black delegates that they get as many votes and positions of power as the vastly larger number of whites. When it came to Vietnam, the mood at the convention and among leftist antiwar activists across the country was angrier and more pessimistic; there was an emerging awareness that everything that had been tried to stop the war to that point had failed. Students in this faction, as author Thomas Powers wrote in
The War at Home,
were seeking to “harden themselves for an escalating struggle.” In Madison this attitude was particularly strong. As a newspaper article described some local antiwar leaders, “They have been through the acceptable protest routine (canvassing, teach-ins, incessant discussion) and emerged with their passivity gone.”