They Marched Into Sunlight (18 page)

Few students who took his courses could forget Mosse’s lectures. He had the ability of all spellbinding teachers to make subtle connections and allusions and bring intellectual coherence to the physical chaos of the world. His underlying themes were the uses and meaning of violence in the modern world, attacks on liberalism from left and right, the question of how good men could survive amid evil, and the many seductions of nationalism. One of his lectures was on mass casualties and the “domestication of war” in the twentieth century. He used the image of military cemeteries between the two world wars to make his points:

What then were the ways in which the tragic reality of war was made manageable, acceptable?

Central to the confrontation with mass death was the cult of the fallen soldier, and like all the sacred in our civilization it was not something new or invented for the purpose, but based upon ancient religious feeling; the adaptation of Christian piety to the war experience. The death of the fallen, their sacrifice for the nation, was often linked to the passion and resurrection of Christ. This was symbolized for example by the design of English war cemeteries, all of which contain the Cross of Sacrifice: a cross upon which a sword was superimposed. Sometimes such a cross faced a chapel of resurrection. Such linking of national sacrifice and Christian sacrifice no doubt made it easier to come to terms with the tragedies of war.

Military cemeteries symbolized this confrontation with mass death. As places of national and Christian worship they made it easier to accept death by transcending it. The distinction between soldiers’ cemeteries and bourgeois cemeteries, made in Germany as early as 1915, is important here: bourgeois cemeteries were said to be materialistic in the exaggerated boastfulness of their monuments, but in soldiers’ cemeteries simplicity symbolized wartime camaraderie and, so we are told, led into a serious and reverential mood….

Always such cemeteries must symbolize the eternal, sacred nature of the nation and its heroes. Built into this masking of death was a longing for rest, a preindustrial nostalgia which eventually would benefit the European right…. The victorious nations could be quietest in their cult. In Germany and Italy the radical right took up this heritage. I can illustrate this no better than by the chorus of the Hitler Youth on Memorial Day: “The best of our people did not die that the living might die, but that the dead might come alive.” The cult of the fallen became not only a masking of death, of transcending the horror of war, but a call to domination and revenge. The cult as the worship of the nation was in the forefront here, rather than, as in the victorious nations, the cult as helping to assimilate the staggering human cost of war….

Even while continuing to honor the memory of the fallen, we must never lose our horror, never try to integrate war and its consequences into our longing for the sacred…. If we confront mass death naked, stripped of all myth, we may have slightly more chance to avoid making the devil’s pact with that aggressive nationalism whose blood trail has marked our century.

Soglin was by nature more politician than ideologue, with that peculiar politico’s mix of self-centeredness and worldly curiosity. He was fascinated by what moved crowds and what defined a leader, and he wanted to know what the other person, the other side, was thinking, if not feeling. That is precisely what Mosse encouraged in historians. “One cannot understand one’s own history or the history of one’s ethnicity without trying to understand the motivations of others, whether they are friendly or hostile,” Mosse once wrote. “A historian, if he is to get history right, cannot be bigoted or narrow-minded. Empathy is for me still at the core of the historical enterprise, but understanding does not mean withholding judgment.” Soglin was not an intellectual and was never part of the coterie of brilliant young doctoral students whom Mosse nurtured during that era, but he was nonetheless a devoted admirer. He was so enthralled by Mosse that he often sat in the back of the hall and stared directly at the professor over the lowered heads of hundreds of classmates furiously scribbling notes. He would just listen, without taking notes, a true believer in what Mosse called his faith. “What man is,” Mosse would say, “only history tells.”

As much as Soglin and his friends dismissed the fraternity crowd, they had their own predictable patterns that differed mostly in style. After classes each day, Paul would go down to the Union to “see what was happening,” and then as soon as the cafeteria opened at four forty-five he ate dinner, and by five fifteen he was at the library studying, then off to a political meeting and home by ten or eleven, where he and his roommates would sit around and talk and drink or smoke dope and try to put the moves on girls, and then repeat the process the next day. A second pattern would begin at noon Friday, when Soglin started looking for a game of bridge in the Rathskeller, where he would play until eight or nine that night, then walk upstairs to listen to music in the Great Hall or go down the street to Lorenzo’s or the 602 Club or the Uptown Café, where jazz flowed until two or three in the morning. The “one rule,” Soglin recalled, “was that nothing interfered from roughly noon on Friday until you studied on Sunday night. We often used to say that when the revolution came, it wasn’t going to start until after noon, because everybody was sleeping, and it certainly wouldn’t take place on a weekend. Which may have sounded like we were being selfish, but in a way it was really important that we set aside Friday night through Sunday morning just to socialize or whatever.” In spring and fall there was a regular softball doubleheader on Sunday mornings at a playing field at the corner of Dayton and Frances, the drug freaks against the politicos.

Some fragments of the American dream still held; young men who harbored revolutionary fantasies traded those in for a few hours of being Yaz or Lou Brock.

L
IKE 2.4 MILLION OTHER
college students, Soglin was protected from military service with a student deferment during his undergraduate years, but the draft was an unavoidable part of the Vietnam discussion. He had decided that if the Lake County, Illinois, draft board ever tried to call him up, he would refuse to serve on grounds that he opposed the war. He did not consider himself a conscientious objector, nor did he want to go to Canada. His choice, he told friends, was jail, though it was a rhetorical option that he never had to take. When fifty students at Wisconsin signed a full-page advertisement in the
Cardinal
declaring that they would refuse to be drafted, Soglin was not among them. He was still in the second or third tier of student activists, not a major player in the movement, though he wanted to be. He was “crushed, just crushed,” that he had missed out, and later reflected, “How could they have been circulating it and I missed it? Was I stoned for two days?”

The antiwar movement’s position on the draft was a jumble of contradictions. Young men who did not want to serve and did not want the university to cooperate with the Selective Service in any way nonetheless criticized the system for its inequities and the protection it provided them in contrast to minorities and working-class whites who did not attend college. For all the talk of revolution on campus, the proletariat was fighting another war, in Vietnam. In the spring of 1966 Congressman Alvin O’Konski conducted a survey of one hundred military inductees from his northern Wisconsin district and determined that not one of them came from a family with an average income over five thousand dollars.

It was the draft that provoked the largest demonstration on campus during Soglin’s undergraduate career, coming only a few weeks before his graduation in May 1966. The issue was whether UW officials should provide grades and class rankings to the Selective Service, which had announced that deferments from the draft would be based on academic performance and that men in the lower half of their class would have to score well on a new test to avoid being drafted. Members of SDS and the Ad Hoc Committee on the University and the Draft presented demands to President Harrington and Robben W. Fleming, the chancellor, that the school stop cooperating with draft boards and that they call an emergency meeting of the faculty to revise the university’s policy. There was intense debate over how to proceed with the protest after the demands were presented, and though a majority of those attending an SDS meeting, including Soglin, voted against holding a sit-in, a smaller faction decided to go ahead with one anyway. The sit-in, which began on May 16 at the new Peterson administration building on Murray Street, soon took on a life of its own. “Everyone, regardless of their initial position,” joined in, Soglin recalled, and “within the night and the next day the place was packed.” Along with similar sit-ins that month at the University of Chicago and City College of New York, the takeover of the administration building in Madison marked another turning point in the antiwar movement: students were now occupying campus buildings as a means of protest.

The demonstration ebbed and flowed for several days and nights. It was peaceful and at times jovial. Professor Williams stopped by one night to talk to the protesters, who found him supportive in theory but not in practice and in any case uncharacteristically incoherent. Students traded jokes with campus police and tried not to interfere with the personnel who worked there. Jim Rowen, a junior from suburban Washington, D.C., who stayed the whole time, was struck by the way friendly workers would bring food for students during the protest marathon; someone gave him a carton of milk—“very Wisconsin.” There were long discussions about the draft. Often there would be two or three self-appointed student leaders holding forth at the same time in different parts of the room, though the rhetoric was usually dominated by Bob Cohen, who made the most dramatic speeches. When things dragged, delegations were sent up the hill to confer with the administration. The city police force was kept away, as were antidemonstrators.

For William Kaplan, a freshman from Wilmette, this was his first major demonstration, and he found it “pretty euphoric.” He “met a lot of people, had fun,” and felt part of an “instant peer group”—something he had never experienced at New Trier, his suburban Chicago high school. He could tell himself that he was saving the world and at the same time develop a social network and go out with different girls and watch the older protest leaders operate. He was especially taken by Soglin. “He wasn’t a Marxist, but he was kind of like a beatnik, and I liked that part of Paul,” Kaplan said later. “I didn’t like the Marxists. I wanted to be a beatnik rather than a Marxist. He was cooler, a little more hip. And I liked that side of him.”

Soglin “picked up a girl” one night during the siege and faced a conflict that only a budding politician, not a true beatnik, could fall into—and solve. He wanted to take her back to his apartment on Dayton Street, only five blocks away, but worried that it would be embarrassing if anything dramatic happened while he was gone. If authorities came in and cleared the place out, it was important for him to be able to say that he was there. So he found Ralph Hanson, the campus police chief, a friendly adversary, and quietly got reassurance that there was nothing in the works. Sometime after midnight, Soglin and his newfound friend “slinked out a back alley.”

A few days into the sit-in, in the brilliant sunlight of a springtime noon, several thousand protesters marched up Bascom Hill. They flooded the wide lawn from the Abe Lincoln statue halfway down to Park Street a few hundred yards below and cheered thunderously when Williams called them “the conscience of the university.” Then Harrington and Fleming announced that a faculty meeting would reconsider the school’s draft policy. Word of the reconciliation infuriated many members of the Wisconsin legislature, none more than Republican legislator Gordon Roseleip of Darlington, who had denounced the sit-in as “a great help to our enemies and communism all around the world.” Equally upset were hard-line members of SDS who had stayed behind in the administration building. They complained that the students had been “out-finessed” by Chancellor Fleming, a veteran labor negotiator. Fleming was indeed proud of the way he handled the potentially explosive situation, and later, in a private letter, described his “pillow” strategy: “Students can punch the pillow but it moves over without greatly observable changes.” But one of those most heartened by the protest and its resolution was Paul Soglin. On May 19 he ripped a page from his notebook and wrote a letter bursting with optimism.

President Harrington,

Please excuse the way in which I am writing you this note (the notebook paper and pencil) but it is all I have with me at this time and I felt that it was important to express my feelings to you at this very moment.

As I was walking up the Hill just now I recalled what happened twenty-four hours ago and the whole series of events since last Friday. All of us are so very critical of what we call the ‘multiversity’ and the resulting alienation that is felt by the student.

No matter how this draft question is resolved I think this last week will be one that will most vividly remain in my mind when in the future I recall my four years as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin.

Perhaps thrilling would be the best way of describing my feelings—thrilled at seeing so many people discuss, debate and resolve a difficult problem. Thrilled at being part of thousands who have taken part in the attempt to reach a consensus. And thrilled most of all at seeing an administration, a faculty and a student body—which according to myth are never supposed to agree on anything—working together so that the views and interests of all may be accommodated.

For the first time I am able to say that I am proud to be a student at the University of Wisconsin.

I feel that you and your administration are the ones who have created the atmosphere in which I have obtained this feeling—and I have an obligation to notify you of it.