They Marched Into Sunlight (40 page)

Even as Dow developed into a multinational corporation in the 1960s under the stewardship of what became known as the Troika, consisting of Ted Doan, chairman Carl A. Gerstacker, and chief operating officer Ben Branch, the corporate personality carried the imprint of its isolationist past. Gerstacker had come from a family of America Firsters who opposed U.S. entry into World War II. His father, he once said, “had no use for foreigners, and he included people from the west coast and east coast as foreigners.” Doan’s father, Lee Doan, who had married H. H. Dow’s daughter Ruth, was of the same view. He ran a postwar Dow management team that wanted nothing to do with the Japanese and little to do with the Germans or British either. “Those guys came out of the war mad at the world and they had a chemical company that was damned good, the envy of the world, and they didn’t need anything and they thought, ‘To hell with those guys,’” Ted Doan later explained. As a young turk in the corporation, he said, he got into many arguments with the old-timers as he pushed the idea of finally “getting with the world.”

The board of directors in 1967 was still an inside operation of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, but within that limited realm debate was encouraged and dissent tolerated, to a degree. Doan had overseen a two-day discussion of the napalm issue at the board meeting that year. At the end of the first day, as he later described it, “with nothing decided but with three or four members looking as if they might take a stand against napalm, everyone went home and must have had a very troubled sleep.” The next morning many of the doubters came to Doan individually and said they had decided that Dow should continue producing napalm. A lone dissenter, marketing director Bill Dixon, held firm. “There was no equivocation in his mind that we should get out of that business, and not because we couldn’t stand the pressure, but because it was wrong, just wrong to be producing that product,” Doan recalled. “A very sensitive man. One of the best marketing guys Dow ever had. He was the kind of guy to worry about this more than the average fellow. Everybody respected Bill Dixon for his stance on napalm. Nobody said, ‘Bill, you’re out of your mind. You shouldn’t do that.’ Instead it was, ‘All you have to do is get eight more of them [votes, for a majority on the sixteen-member board] and we’re out of this thing.” Dixon never could get eight more votes.

The most difficult ethical issue for Doan and the board was whether Dow, by arguing that it was fulfilling a government request, was essentially falling back on the just-following-orders rationalization that German manufacturers used to defend their support of the Nazi war effort. Doan considered this “an excellent point,” but he eventually prepared a formal answer that evolved from the board’s discussions: “We reject the validity of comparing our present form of government with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. In our mind our government is still responsive to the will of the people. Further, we as a company have made a moral judgment on the long range goals of our government and we support those. We may not agree as individuals with every decision of every military or governmental leader but we regard those leaders as men trying honestly and relentlessly to find the best possible solutions to very complex international problems. As long as we so regard them we would find it impossible not to support them. This is not saying as the critics imply that we will follow blindly and without fail no matter where our government leads. While I think it highly unlikely under our form of government, should despotic leaders attempt to lead our nation away from its historic national purposes, we would cease to support the government. Our critics ask if we are willing to stand judgment for our choice to support our government if history should prove us wrong. Our answer is yes.”

Doan later translated that last point into more graphic prose. “If we’re found wrong after the war,” he said, “we’ll be glad to be hung for it.”

As the anti-Dow protests continued throughout that year, the napalm issue came to dominate Doan’s working days. Memos from the recruiting department, phone calls from Ned Brandt at public relations, letters from university administrators—“it was a topic of conversation every day,” Doan said. It also became a topic of conversation many nights when he got home to his wife and four children. The Doan family lived amid the old Dow apple orchards on Valley Drive in a modernist house designed by an uncle who had studied at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in the Wisconsin countryside west of Madison. For all its seeming inwardness, Midland also had a progressive streak that was never more evident than in the Wright-inspired architecture of Alden Dow, whose homes and other buildings could be seen throughout town. That progressive sensibility had filtered into the mind of Donalda Doan, Ted Doan’s wife, who by the fall of 1967 was turning against the war in Vietnam.

She came from “the patriotic generation,” Donalda Doan would say, but to her “there wasn’t any real reason to get into that mess” in Vietnam. She viewed the defense of the war as “kind of the knee-jerk response of big businessmen”—including her husband. One of her close friends in Midland, a clinical psychologist, had been antiwar from the start, and Ted Doan complained that the woman was putting ideas in Donalda’s head. Donalda said she could think for herself. And if the dinner table conversation got a bit heated, at least there was conversation. Her husband, from Donalda’s perspective, was usually “very much closed, like most of the Dow men.” They were not talkers, and particularly not about what they were doing at work. The tension of the war was starting to change that, for better or worse. Ted Doan found the new family dynamics frustrating. “My wife, in addition to being a very, very good, sound person, also got quite liberal,” he recalled. “One of the difficult things was that she was never sure herself that napalm thing was a good thing. I used to go home and have to talk this over—why were we doing what we were doing?—and I don’t think she believed me worth a damn. I think that was my hardest sell.” It was not exactly a family revolt, Doan said, but his views were no longer going unquestioned. He had to defend himself.

The reverberations of that family disagreement went on for years. The oldest Doan son dropped out of Pomona College in Southern California and was drafted into the army, but happened to be in the stockade when his unit was sent to Vietnam. “That bad boy was saved,” Donalda Doan later declared when describing the “wonderful story” that kept her son from going to Vietnam. The oldest daughter also headed west to California and turned away from the family history by marching with Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers during the grape boycotts. The youngest son became a conscientious objector. And so it went with one upper-middle-class midwestern family whose children were coming of age in the sixties and whose father happened to be president of Dow Chemical Company. Ted Doan was not alone. As he would later say, “There were a lot of guys in Midland who had a lot of trouble with their families.”

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settled in at the Ivy Inn, a young son of Michigan sat among a group of 350 antiwar protesters who had gathered in Great Hall in the Memorial Union on that Monday night of October 16. There could never be enough meetings in the student movement, it seemed, and here was one more, a final tactical briefing and debate concerning the anti-Dow demonstrations that were to unfold over the following two days. The young Michigander was Jonathan Stielstra, identical twin of Phil Stielstra, the sons of William Stielstra, descendants of the Dutch-Calvinist Stielstras who settled in Holland, Michigan, in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a wave of religious immigrants fleeing the Netherlands. William Stielstra, who served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the Pacific theater during the Second World War, was a highly respected college administrator who had been hired recently to serve as the dean of students at the Wisconsin State University system’s campus in Stevens Point, one hundred miles north of Madison. Clarence “Stiely” Stielstra, William’s brother and Jonathan and Phil’s uncle, worked as an executive at Dow Chemical Company. All in the family, again.

Jonathan Star Stielstra was a transfer student from Calvin College in Grand Rapids. He had arrived in Madison the previous spring term as a second-semester junior and philosophy major, and it would be hard to imagine a more dramatic cultural transition than the one he made that year, though in broad outline his journey resembled ones made by countless college students coming out of America’s suburbs and small towns and plunging headlong into the abundant new world of freedom. Calvin College was affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church, which based its faith on the Scriptures as “God’s holy, inspired, infallible Word.” It housed the largest collection of scholarly works on John Calvin in North America. Its students attended mandatory chapel services. There was no dancing on campus. The student body was largely conservative. In his sophomore year Stielstra ran for class president and reached the office through a series of accidents, when the favorite dropped out and the subsequent winner was stripped of the title. He was regarded by some as an unconventional class leader, largely for bringing the New Christy Minstrels to campus to sing folk songs.

How did a young Calvinist get to Madison? For Stielstra part of the impetus was that he could attend Wisconsin as an in-state student since his parents had moved to Stevens Point (from Lafayette, Indiana, where William Stielstra had been an administrator at Purdue University), and part of it was a compulsion to escape, to find a place with a more freewheeling atmosphere. At Madison there was no infallible Word; everything was up for grabs; they sold beer to eighteen-year-olds; students smoked in classrooms; marijuana was available. Stielstra came into town a gangly, blond, six-foot-three Dutchman, and took spontaneously to the open life. His cultural and political interests bloomed. He grew out his hair, smoked dope, and began attending leftist student meetings. He bunked at a bohemian rooming house on North Frances near the corner of University Avenue, then found a house at 1215 Drake Street in the old neighborhood down by Henry Vilas Park that he rented with his brother Phil, who came at the end of the summer, and two other students, including Mark Knops, an antiwar activist and graduate student in history.

Only nine months after he got to Madison, the transformation of Jonathan Stielstra was complete: He and Knops were churning out antiwar leaflets in the dank basement on Drake Street on a mimeograph machine they called the Clandestine Bolshevik Press. He was a regular at SDS meetings and was on the periphery of the planning for the protests against the napalm-producing corporation where his uncle Stiely worked. The latest missive denounced the alliance between the university and the corporation: “Dow Chemical Corporation manufactures napalm that burns and maims the people of Vietnam. The university is furnishing the technicians who create the tools of destruction as well as the facilities for hiring these technicians. But war and violence have no place in an institution of learning. By permitting this recruitment to occur here the university in fact works for the war effort, in this case for the burning of children. The student can no more allow this university to facilitate this recruitment than he can excuse himself for seeking employment with Dow.”

The crowd in Great Hall was larger than that for the previous planning meeting three nights earlier at Social Sciences, and less contentious. There was less political posturing now among the various groups that had joined together to form the ad hoc anti-Dow committee. Evan Stark and Robert Cohen stood up front but did not try to dominate the session. Paul Soglin was there but did not speak. He and his lawyers, Percy Julian and Michael Reiter, had just filed papers in federal court—
Soglin et al. v. Kauffman et al.
—seeking to prevent university officials from usurping the free speech rights of the protesters. U.S. District Judge James J. Doyle had issued a temporary restraining order, Reiter announced, but this did not give the students “free reign to obstruct or be violent.” The court action, another law student explained, was “primarily for the newspapers” and probably would not be of much help. A group of law students would wear armbands to the demonstrations and provide legal advice as well as bring cameras to document the scene. Students were told that they did not have to give their names or show their fee cards unless they were placed under arrest. They were advised to come to the obstructive rally empty-handed, with nothing more than a fee card and draft card in their pockets, leaving their wallets, purses, and books at home. Women were told not to wear pierced earrings, rings, clips, chains, or contact lenses.

The same undercover agent from the Madison Police Department who had attended the previous meeting was there again, gathering information for another report to Chief Emery. He estimated the crowd at three hundred, and it seemed to him that “a majority of them seemed to be looking forward to the following two or three days of protesting in an especially militant fashion.” He paid particular attention to the final plans for Wednesday’s obstructive protest. The demonstrators would gather at 9:10 at the bottom of Bascom Hill and be told there which of the three buildings where Dow interviews were taking place they would target for the sit-in. Then they would march to the chosen site en masse. (In his report to Emery, the agent offered a suggestion on how to counter this tactic: “It would probably be advantageous for us to divide and disperse them by only allowing a certain number into whatever building they pick, locking the door behind them and not letting any more in until those who go in come out. This would prevent them from getting their number concentrated in a small area, which would be to their advantage. It would also mean that they would have to subdivide several times in order to cover all the entrances to that building by which those legitimately wishing to interview with Dow might enter, and it would give our police more room to maneuver in.” An interesting idea, but apparently not one that the police leaders later considered.)