They Marched Into Sunlight (62 page)

Jim Rowen and Susan McGovern, two-thirds of the way down the corridor, could see and hear the commotion at the other end. It was an eerie phenomenon, Rowen recalled, all noise and light moving their way, the screams of students and the lights of television cameras. And on top of this a sound Rowen had never heard before, one that he could not immediately place. Then, perhaps ten seconds later, he realized what it was—“the sound of people having their heads hit. It was like a basketball bouncing on the floor. Or hitting a watermelon with a baseball bat. It makes a sort of
thunk.
” It all became clear to Rowen at that moment. “Civil disobedience wasn’t working on our terms. They weren’t arresting people, they were beating people. That’s how they were clearing the hallway. Just going through like a machine and beating people.” Tom Beckmann, a business student from Whitefish Bay, was taking a pop quiz at that moment in a classroom one floor above the melee. The door to the room was closed, but still Beckmann and his classmates could hear it all. “We could hear kids being hit on the head with nightsticks. It was gut-wrenching. It sounded like somebody taking a two-by-four and slamming it on a table.”

From his place amid the students halfway down the hallway, Jack Cipperly, the assistant dean of students, saw police helmets bobbing above the heads of the crowd and “nightsticks rising and falling, rising and falling.” He heard “a series of cries emanate from the group” and tried to move forward toward the police to warn them that they were approaching an area occupied by many young women protesters. Cipperly pleaded with the first officers to refrain from using their clubs. “At this point it must be explained that a certain amount of hysteria and panic was apparent within the group,” he reported later. “In many cases the officers and the students appeared to be acting independently. Several curses were reciprocally exchanged between the police and the demonstrators…. In my direct observation I witnessed many policemen who pulled students to their feet without using their nightsticks; at the same time, I witnessed individual policemen who struck students who were on the ground.” Some cops were restrained, Cipperly said, but some were not. When he saw one officer wind up as though he were going to strike a young woman, Cipperly “grabbed him, like hockey players do.” It turned out to be Jerry Gritsmacher, with whom Cipperly had gone to Catholic grade school and high school.

“Jerry, what are you doing?” Cipperly asked.

“Jack, what are
you
doing?” the officer responded.

As people in the hallway retreated, Michael Oberdorfer, who had been sitting outside the interview room, moved forward. He heard a woman screaming “Stop! Stop! I’m hurt! I’m hurt!” and moved toward the screams, finally reaching a young woman who was bent over, clutching her knees, sobbing. She had been clubbed in the abdomen and uterus. Oberdorfer picked her up and carried her toward the foyer and the front entrance. He was enraged, acting on reflex, shouting madly as he moved through a phalanx of police clubs.
What the hell’s wrong with you guys! Can’t you see I’m trying to help someone who’s hurt!
He brought the young woman out the double doors, swinging his elbows furiously as he went, knocking an officer to the ground.

Paul Soglin and Jonathan Stielstra had been in the line of protesters standing not far from Cipperly, outside the Dow interview room. Suddenly the crowd in front of them disappeared and there was nothing between them and the bull-rushing police. Soglin saw five officers coming toward him. He and Stielstra and the others started backpedaling very slowly, trying not to start a stampede, shouting at the police as they retreated. Soglin pulled the collar of his sheepskin coat over his neck and the back of his head. Then, as he later described the moment, “they just came right at me. It was almost like, ‘We’ll get that one next.’ And they grabbed me and started beating me, and I ended up right on the floor. I don’t know how long it lasted…. But I know I was holding my own and they were getting frustrated. Because the jacket was doing its job. The jacket was doing its job in protecting my head and my back pretty much. One of them hit me right on the base of the spine. I was on my side, and instinctively my arms went out and my legs went out, my limbs just shot out. And at that point everything was exposed. And then they started working on my legs and my head.”

The students behind Soglin were scrambling. After watching the police go through the demonstrators “like a hot knife through butter,” Billy Kaplan, the junior from Wilmette, decided that he would save himself from that fate. He heard people “crying and screaming, and it was real crazy, real chaotic,” he recalled. He had “never seen police beat anybody at that point except on newsreels from down South, beating blacks. And it had all happened so fast.” As he remembered it, “all of a sudden the doors just blew open and there was this big noise and people were falling down left and right, and you could see these big things coming down on people, and I got the shit scared out of me. I was really frightened. And I ran. I just ran. And having just been near the bathroom, I went inside. There were maybe a half dozen of us.” A policeman followed Kaplan into the bathroom. He thought he and the others would “be beaten to within an inch of our lives.” And what a way, what a place to get beaten, he thought, “in a damn bathroom.” But the officer did not touch them. “Out! Out! Get your asses out!” he yelled, pushing them back into the hallway.

Rowen and McGovern, who had been positioned a few yards behind Soglin, were trying to escape toward the stairwell at the western end of the corridor but found their way blocked. Rowen turned around in time to see Soglin being beaten. Less than a decade later the two would run the city of Madison together, Soglin as mayor and Rowen as his chief of staff, but at the time they barely knew each other. Rowen recognized Soglin by “his hair and his jacket. The trademark jacket with sheepskin lining.” The image that would stick in his mind was of Soglin “in a ball, a little fetal position ball. And a cop beating him on his back and making this tremendous sort of whacking sound.”

Finally, as Soglin recounted, “one of the officers said, ‘Have you had enough?’—as though it had been asked several times before. And they picked me up and threw me forward, and I am now on my own, on my feet. And they are moving on to whoever is behind me. And they are now escorting me out. Sort of like running the gauntlet, because there are more officers. And they had no real further interest in me except getting me out of the building, which was a surprise.” Soglin made his way to the foyer and through the vestibule, past the broken glass, out to the plaza. “And there is a mammoth crowd out there. And I come out and another officer just kind of throws me by the collar beyond the ring of officers into the crowd.” Swacker and Stielstra were right behind him. Swacker made it through untouched. Stielstra had been whacked a few times on the way out, but was able to remain standing and avoid serious blows. “I probably covered my head,” he recounted later. “Or maybe they just thought, ‘This guy doesn’t look robust enough, let’s not hurt him too bad.’”

The scene in the north-south hallway, where the nonobstructive supportive picketers were gathered, was much the same. John Pickart and Everett Goodwin watched the approaching wedge of officers with disbelief. Pickart was standing on a chair outside the door to Krasny’s classroom. He saw “a Quaker girl” with whom he had argued philosophy just moments earlier, “still sitting there and getting hit so hard by a police nightstick.” And “a boy lying across a girl and obviously just trying to shield her, getting kicked and struck by two policemen.” Much as in the scene in the east-west corridor, students who wanted to escape found themselves trapped: police coming at them from one direction, an immobile jam of people behind them in the other direction.

Betty Menacher was in the north-south hallway when the police charge began. She had heard the ruckus outside her classroom and opened the door, which locked behind her. Soon the crowd was backing up in her direction.

A woman pushed her against the wall and said, “What’s wrong with you? You’re not ready at all. Pull your hair back and take your earrings off!” Then the corridor resounded with shouts and shrieks and it seemed to Menacher that “an army was coming down the hallway.” She watched as two policemen grabbed a young woman by her long blond hair and yanked her down the hall. Then she saw “a policeman hit a kid over the head and the blood just gushed out.” It was time to flee, Menacher thought. She started moving backwards down the hallway, trying to enter each classroom door she passed. Finally she banged on a door and heard voices inside. A woman opened the door just as a policeman grabbed one of Menacher’s arms.

“You fucking pig, let go!” the woman inside screamed at the officer. A young man came up and grabbed Menacher’s other arm. The officer let go and shoved Menacher into the room. Pickart made it into the room as well, and they all climbed out the window and ran toward the front of Commerce. Krasny and his handful of freshmen students joined them out the window. On the way toward the plaza Pickart saw several students running by, covered with blood. “Those damn bastards can’t do this to us,” one girl screamed.

In the heat of the confontration, cops versus students, individual human beings tended to be seen only as representatives of a type, and the intense hatred of one type for the other now was overwhelming. But John Pickart felt conflicting emotions. He was furious about the police attack, by their use of nightsticks, by the fact that the administration had allowed the confrontation to take place, yet he was also disturbed by the mass psychology of the angry crowd. “In the general confusion I made my way to a point where I could get a fairly good view of the front doorway,” he reported in a letter he wrote later that night to Pam Crane, a high school friend who attended Oberlin College. “It was a terrible sight…. Then the students by the door started spitting on the police and screaming at them. The policemen charged with their clubs. I left again. This time for good. I couldn’t stand to see 2,000 people acting like animals. I still can’t believe it, in my home town! On my university! It was terrible. I have never seen such hysteria and hatred in so large a group of people. On my way out, I looked back to see the whole crowd screaming ‘Dirty Fascist Honky’ at the police.”

C
HIEF
H
ANSON
had been out of the action since that initial foray when he had been pushed back through the vestibule. He saw only the first few seconds of the confrontation inside. From the front plaza he had walked down the slope to enter the building from the western side, a floor below the main level, and was walking up the stairwell when he encountered a band of students rushing down toward the exit. He heard someone shout, “They’re coming, they’re coming,” and presumed this referred to the police. Hanson decided to leave with this group and went back across the street to the original police assembly area near the Carillon Tower, where he found his bullhorn. Looking across Observatory Drive at the front entrance of Commerce, he saw students spilling out the double doors, the police forming a semicircle in front of the doors, and an enormous crowd now stirring behind the ring of officers. “This was a growing or escalating crowd of people,” Hanson later testified. “Some of the people coming out, they were holding their hands on their head, some of the girls were crying hysterically, some of these people came over to me and for the next few minutes they were in front of me. The students who had formed around him, Hanson said, were “verbally abusing me, in other words subjecting me to insults and spitting on me and this type of thing.”

Michael Reiter, an attorney for the student protest leaders, approached the chief and urged him to do something about the bloody confrontation inside. The police were using clubs, Reiter said, and Hanson should go in an attempt to stop them. Hanson said that things were beyond his control, that he could not get back inside. Reiter persisted. He said that he and a few other students would form a cordon and clear the way for him through the mass of students. “I indicated to them that I didn’t think I could get in there but I was willing to try,” Hanson recalled. “This they did then. They did form a wedge for me through this—now I am calling it a hostile and belligerent, defiant, mad, frenzied crowd.”

“Let him through! Let him through!” Reiter shouted to the students as he led Hanson across the plaza toward the front doors of Commerce. As Hanson recalled the difficult procession, he got “a couple punches in the face and one in the back.” He saw some people charging at him, but they were blocked, and he made it to the perimeter and had the bullhorn up and was yelling “Stop! Stop! Stop it! Stop it!” But when he reached the vestibule and stepped into the foyer, he looked down the corridors and there was nobody there—nobody, that is, except police officers.

Chancellor Sewell had not moved from the back window of the Bascom office. He saw the students staggering out of Commerce, heads bloodied, disappearing into a thunderous crowd that now numbered nearly five thousand.
My God, I’ve just screwed everything up.

Jonathan Stielstra, now a face in that angry mob, looked up toward Bascom Hall, his gaze moving above Sewell at the window, up to the peaked roof of the old building, where he noticed the Wisconsin and American flags flapping in the breeze.
How incongruous,
he thought. How could the flags fly above this mess?
This is not right,
he thought.
This is not what the flags stand for.
At that moment, acting on impulse, the young philosopher from Michigan, the earnest transfer student from Calvin College, the son of a university administrator and nephew of a Dow executive, came up with a brazen plan.

Chapter 23

Stars and Stripes

D
OWNTOWN AT
police headquarters, Tom McCarthy was trying to dictate a report to the secretary of the detective squad, but he kept being distracted by anxious squawks coming over the scanner in the captain’s office. It was obvious that something had gone terribly wrong on campus—that “the shit was hitting the fan down there.” McCarthy stopped to listen, then dictated again, then listened to the radio some more. He was not altogether unhappy to be away from the action at Commerce. When Chief Emery had called for volunteers for riot-control duty, McCarthy had not volunteered. He wanted nothing to do with the long-haired kids and was content to dislike them from afar. That time on the city bus when he told a hippie-looking student that someone should drop a nuclear bomb on top of Bascom Hall, he was only half joking. He was a detective, not a riot-control cop. He worked in street clothes, tracking down thugs and robbers. It was best, he thought, to stay away from the demonstration.