Co-authored with Robbie Lieberman. From The New Left Revisited, edited by John McMillian and Paul Buhle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003)
In
late February 1970, Southern Illinois University’s Carbondale
campus was in an uproar. More than a thousand students were engaged
in a campaign of civil disobedience, and the dean of students
responded by suspending six leaders of the student government,
including Dwight Campbell, the first African American president of
the student body in SIU’s history, and student body vice president
Richard Wallace. Student leaders reacted by calling for a boycott of
classes, while Campbell proclaimed, “Students are niggers and it’s
time to break the chains.”
On
the surface, these events appear fairly typical of the student
movement of the late sixties and early seventies in terms of tactics
and rhetoric. But a closer look reveals a much more complicated and
paradoxical picture. In the first place, we have a black leader
defining himself as a “nigger”—not because he is African
American but because he’s a student.
Second, the issue that provoked such upheaval concerned the
university’s in loco parentis policies, specifically
restrictions on the hours that men and women could study together in
women’s dormitories. Led by Campbell and Wallace’s Unity Party,
the student senate had passed a bill extending these hours from 9:00
P.M. to 11:00 P.M. on weeknights and from 11:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. on
weekends. When the bill was vetoed by the board of trustees, students
began defying the administration en masse.
Finally,
the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience over the issue of dorm
hours stands out when placed against the backdrop of increasing
violence nationally and events at SIU over the previous two years. In
1968 SIU witnessed numerous bomb threats and several bombings,
including one in May that caused $50,000 worth of damage to the
Agriculture Building. In June 1969 the Old Main Building—the
campus’s most recognizable landmark—burned to the ground. All
such acts were attributed to anti-Vietnam War radicals.
In the first two months of 1970, antiwar students had engaged in a
series of demonstrations against the Center for Vietnamese Studies on
campus, including an occupation of the center that had been forcibly
put down by campus and city police.
Student leaders had responded to police violence with an explicit
rejection of nonviolence. Terming the event a “police riot,”
Campbell said, “there is a crisis on this campus and this is just
the beginning. Going up against a club with a flower will never
work.”
It thus seems jarring that a few weeks after defending the occupation
of buildings and urging self-defense in antiwar activities, Campbell
would be engaged in leading something so quaintly anachronistic as an
integrated, nonviolent protest over dorm hours.
The
rapid growth of the student movement in places like Carbondale
created these kinds of juxtapositions. Nationally the movement had
evolved, as ideologies and tactics developed and adapted to changing
situations. Integration gave way to “black power,” Gandhi to
Fanon, civil disobedience to revolution, the Port Huron Statement
to the Weathermen. But in places like Carbondale this development was
telescoped into a brief period. We see then, coexisting
simultaneously, rhetoric and strategies that had developed over
several years nationwide. For instance, at least at the leadership
level, the movement at SIU was still largely integrated, long after
the national movement had fractured along racial lines.
The
contradictions in the Carbondale student movement largely grew out of
the fact that it was composed of three separate strains that
gradually came together in the late sixties. The first can be
described as a student party culture, which developed with the rapid
increase in university enrollment during the sixties. The second was
the student rights movement, which began in earnest in the
mid-sixties, drawing together politically active students from across
the spectrum. The third student culture, and numerically the
smallest, was the New Left, which had been a presence on campus since
the civil rights movement of the early sixties and had developed
through such organizations as the Student Non-Violent Freedom
Committee (SNFC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These
strains alternately converged and separated until, by the spring of
1970, a combination of local and national events brought them
together for a series of mass demonstrations that culminated in a
student strike and riot that closed the university.
In
many ways, Carbondale is an unlikely place for a major university.
Located on the boundary where the prosperous farmland that makes up
most of Illinois gives way to rugged, forested hills, the area around
Carbondale and southward differs from the rest of the state both
economically and culturally. The economy of southern Illinois
historically has been based on mining, and the region is marked by
many small towns and a history of violent labor struggles and
frequent depressions.
The nearest metropolitan area, St. Louis, lies more than a hundred
miles away, while Chicago is more than three hundred miles north.
As SIU professor and novelist John Gardner wrote in 1973, “nobody
arrives at and nobody escapes from Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale by accident.”
The
transformation of SIU from a small teachers’ college to a major
multiversity occurred between the end of World War II and 1970,
thanks largely to the efforts of one man, SIU president Delyte
Morris. A visionary, Morris undertook a massive building campaign to
accompany the expansion of the university’s mission. Under his
leadership, SIU attracted such luminaries as Buckminster Fuller and
pioneered in a variety of fields, from handicap accessibility to the
creation of the first U.S. program in ecology. Enrollment exploded,
increasing from nine thousand in 1960 to eighteen thousand in 1968 to
almost twenty-four thousand in 1970.
The result was an environment characterized by flux and
experimentation. As one former student recalls, “When I first came
to SIU in ‘64, the campus was raw, unfinished. . . . Temporary
barracks, cheap buildings were being used, with a great many
important functions—things you would think of as important in a
university—carried on in these buildings which were essentially
shacks.”
As
SIU alumnus Dick Gregory remembers, Morris “was not just the head
of the university, he was the father. . . . Delyte Morris was the
first white man I knew who had both power and compassion.”
He was in most respects a staunch liberal. From the beginning he
strongly supported civil rights and sought to increase the black
enrollment at SIU.
He was also deeply committed to using the university to combat the
region’s poverty and to keeping costs and admission standards low
enough to ensure accessibility for the area’s population.
At times Morris’s liberal principles caused him to put students’
right of free speech above the university’s prestige. In 1962, for
instance, he defended the rights of SIU students to participate in
the civil rights movement in nearby Cairo, and in 1965 he allowed the
campus SDS and Socialist Discussion Group to invite Communist Herbert
Aptheker to speak on campus. Both actions provoked strong criticism
outside the university.
At
the same time, as Dick Gregory implies, Morris was a paternalistic
ruler over his domain. He tried to run the university he had created
as if it were still a small teachers’ college where he knew the
students and faculty and they deferred to his benevolent authority.
He dealt with challenges through a combination of strength of
character and diversionary tactics. In 1952 he successfully faced
down a crowd of one thousand male students on a panty raid with the
words, “It’s been fun. Now let’s all go home and go to bed.”
In 1965, when the students rights organization, the Rational Action
Movement, presented a petition calling for greater student
participation in university policy making, Morris defused the
challenge by appointing a commission of students to begin meeting the
following fall and issue recommendations nearly a full year later.
Morris’s
leadership style grew increasingly untenable throughout the decade.
SIU students were in the position, then, as now, of being part of a
large university in a small town in the middle of nowhere, with
limited sources of entertainment. With the rapid increase in
enrollment in the sixties, SIU developed a reputation as a “party
school,” which often placed students in opposition to university
administrators and city officials. The first major confrontation
occurred during finals week in June 1966 and became known as the “Moo
and Cackle riots” after Carbondale’s first downtown fast-food
restaurant, the Moo and Cackle, outside which much of the action took
place.
The
events began on Sunday, June 5, when students engaged in a late-night
water fight that was broken up by police. The next night a large
crowd of male students took part in a panty raid at two women’s
dorms. “Eye-witnesses said many of the coeds encouraged the men in
the demonstrations and threw various ‘unmentionables’ out of
dormitory windows,” according to the local paper.
Again police broke up the festivities, using, students complained,
excessive force. The third night students returned, spreading into
downtown Carbondale. State police dressed in riot gear joined local
and campus cops, firing tear gas into the crowd as students built a
bonfire in the street, threw rocks at police cars, and chanted “cops
eat shit.” When police arrested thirteen students, the crowd
marched to the police station and held a sit-in on Main Street. On
the fourth night police arrested twenty-three more rioters, and
President Morris expelled all students who had been arrested, the
first mass expulsion in SIU’s history.
The
Moo and Cackle riots were merely the first in Carbondale’s long
history of impromptu street demonstrations that frequently turned
into clashes with the police.
Placed in context, the event is characteristic of the development of
SIU’s student movement in several ways. In the first place, the
origins of the riots were completely apolitical. But overreaction by
the police created resentment on the part of the students, which then
became the issue. A reporter on the fourth night of the riot
commented, “Students who were present could give no clear idea of
why they were there, except that ‘they didn’t want to be pushed
around by police’ or ‘we have a right to be out here.’”
Once the demonstrations gained a focus, however, students began
imitating tactics from the civil rights movement, engaging in a mass
sit-in. In spite of such tactics, the overall atmosphere was anything
but nonviolent, as students enjoyed engaging the police in violent
confrontations. As one participant recalled, “There were a bunch of
people running up and down the street, because once you know the
police are after you, it’s fun time.”
Even
as this party culture developed at SIU, it increasingly came to be
dominated by the counterculture of the late sixties. As southern
Illinois native Larry Vaughn, who entered SIU as a freshman in 1968
remembers:
When
I first got here, y’know, I hung out in West Frankfort with
beer-drinking, fast-car-driving kids, so I started hanging out with
the same type in Carbondale in the dorms. And over Christmas I went
home for the holidays and a friend of mine had gone to Stanford
University and he brought some pot home. So we got in the car and
drove out into the country. Instead of drinking we started smoking
pot and by the time the holidays were over it was like my whole
perspective on how to have a good time had changed. So I came back to
the dorms and I started hanging out with an entirely different crowd
of people.
The
counterculture was not just about drug use, however. It was also
about exploring alternative ideas and ways of life, all of which
created a strong sense of community. Jim Hanson, a graduate student
at SIU in the late sixties, described the scene: “There was a lot
of socializing in those days. Most of the houses around Carbondale,
you didn’t even knock on the door, you just walked in. People laid
down real cool, ‘hey man.’ . . . It was a neat time, especially
this kind of public part of living in Carbondale.”
The
student rights movement developed contemporaneously with the party
culture, but at first there were few direct connections between the
two.
The development of student rights as a significant movement on campus
began in the spring of 1965 with the founding of the Rational Action
Movement (RAM). In late April and early May, RAM gathered twenty-five
hundred signatures and held a mass rally focusing on student control
of the student center, the administration’s decision to shorten
spring break, and its censorship of the editorial page of the student
newspaper.
One student warned that “unless our demands are met along the way,
the movement may end up in a riot.”
Another supporter, though, stated that the movement “is not going
to be another Berkeley.”
RAM drew the support of a broad cross-section of students; its
twenty-member coordinating committee included Mike Harty of the
Student Peace Union as well as representatives from the Young
Republicans and the Young Americans for Freedom.
RAM also led to the creation of a student party, the Action Party,
which consistently fought for student rights issues for the rest of
the decade. But President Morris increasingly dug in his heels,
refusing to abolish women’s dorm hours and, in 1967, banning KA,
a student-edited insert in the campus newspaper, after it published
an anonymous article encouraging students to violate dorm visitation
rules.
The
third student culture in the mix grew out of the Student Non-Violent
Freedom Committee, a local chapter of the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee, which was formed in 1962. The SNFC engaged in
regional actions (in Cairo, for instance) as well as in picketing
local businesses that practiced racial discrimination.
In the words of student activist Jim Hanson:
There
was always that group of people [who] got their first baptism as
radicals working in Cairo for civil rights in about ‘62 or, at the
latest, ‘63. And there were probably . . . fifteen to twenty people
who were down there who got shot at, who were SIU students . . . and
that was the core. Most of them operated out of a Marxist-Maoist
understanding of how the world worked and how the United States was
conducting itself, how the university was conducting itself, and, of
course, how the Department of Defense was conducting its foreign
policy in Vietnam.
A
small group of students active in local civil rights activities but
seeking to expand the scope of the movement formed the Socialist
Discussion Club in 1965 because, as founding member Mike Harty put
it, “it occurred to us . . . if you were a recognized student
organization you could get a room at the student center for a meeting
or if you wanted to pass out pamphlets—not that we had any—if you
wanted to and you were a recognized student organization, you could
have a table there.” The group soon began to focus on the war,
handing out antiwar literature next to military recruiters in the
student center.
Within
a fairly short time, the Socialist Discussion Group developed into a
chapter of SDS. As Harty explains, SDS was
never
a large organization, but it was always kind of a front organization
and it, the membership of that old Socialist Discussion group, pretty
much became SDS. Some one of us got a hold of the Port Huron
Statement. We all read it, we all pretty much agreed with it and
felt, well hell, here’s something we can affiliate with and still
have fun, which is pretty much what it was. . . . The irony was that
from ‘65 through ‘68, SDS was in technical terms quite
conservative. We were sort of serious, we weren’t interested in
game playing, we weren’t interested in drugs.
The
local SDS chapter was also totally autonomous and separate from the
national office, though not necessarily by choice. As Harty says, “We
tried to have contact, but nobody ever wrote back.”
Jim Hanson echoes Harty:
It
seemed a very local affair. . . . I didn’t see any coordinated
national leadership. . . . As far as national SDS people coming in
holding rap conferences with us--“Here’s what we’re doing here,
what are you guys doing here? We’ll assist you, we’ll send you
money, we’ll help you get out posters, we’ll do this, we’ll do
that at Carbondale, we’ll help you if you’ll help us”--I never
heard [of or] attended a meeting like that. It was all local insofar
as I knew.
In
addition to SDS, there were other small leftist political
organizations forming on campus in the late sixties. One of the most
important was the Southern Illinois Peace Committee (SIPC), founded
in 1967 and led by Bill Moffett, a black Trotskyite and pacifist.
One SIPC member says that Moffett played a major role in holding the
group to a philosophy of nonsectarianism and nonviolence. “We had a
lot of debates about . . . ideology, did we stand for a certain
ideology? Moffett always succeeded in telling us, no, we’re an
issue-related social movement—that is, we’re going to stop the
war—and any political statements or any acts of violence in the end
would be counterproductive.”
Moffett and the SIPC would maintain this philosophy throughout the
period. Following a violent antiwar riot in February 1970, the SIPC
went into the streets and cleaned up the debris before leading a
peaceful march on twenty-five hundred.
And during the May 1970 riot, Moffett entered occupied buildings to
plead with students not to engage in vandalism.
But the SIPC remained relatively small, and while Moffett was a
visible leader at virtually every antiwar rally of the period, he
never gained a large following.
From
the beginning, organizations such as SDS served as the left wing of
the student rights movement. In Harty’s view, the Left viewed in
loco parentis issues as valuable for educating students about the
nature of their powerlessness. Even apolitical students resented the
administration’s paternalistic actions and SDS believed that such
resentment could be used to “show people what the university was
all about. . . . We also saw it as a way of forming alliances with
people you wouldn’t necessarily go to for an alliance with. People
who you didn’t even know, student government, fraternity and
sorority people.”
Despite
the efforts of SDS to pull the student rights movement leftward, RAM
continued to represent a broad cross-section of the political
spectrum for several years. It was not until the 1967-1968 school
year that the three strains—party culture, student rights, New
Left—began to come together, especially under the leadership of
student government president Ray Lenzi. A candidate for the Action
Party, Lenzi had been elected with his running mate and fraternity
brother Richard Karr on a straight student rights platform. But
during the fall term Lenzi hesitantly began to speak out against the
war, a stance that created tension between him and the conservative
and pro-war Karr.
During
the winter and spring quarters of 1968, Lenzi consciously began to
try to pull the three strains of the movement together. He was aware
that the politicization of many students grew out of their
participation in the party culture. “Everybody was getting turned
on. . . . They were smoking pot, they were dropping acid. . . . That
increased their sense of negativity toward the government. ‘What do
you mean, they put you in jail for doing this?’ That was
just another reason to assume there was something evil about the
authorities and government system.”
In April Lenzi introduced a bill in the student senate titled
“Legalization of Marijuana: Pot is Groovy,” which stated that
“marijuana is too popular to be denied the public” and called on
SIU police to “take the most relaxed attitude toward enforcement of
this law” and “preferably exercise no enforcement whatsoever.”
During the same period Lenzi also became one of the featured speakers
at the growing antiwar demonstrations.
Although
Lenzi and Karr found themselves more and more at odds on political
and cultural matters, they still cooperated on student rights issues.
In April they published an open letter in the campus paper
criticizing the administration for ignoring a student senate bill
calling for the reform of women’s dorm hours. The letter called on
students to engage in mass civil disobedience by ignoring university
rules and “determin[ing] their own hours.”
Student
rights issues continued to provide the glue that held the three
student cultures together, though frequently in odd ways. In April
1969, for example, three hundred women staged an after-hours walkout
from their dorm, chanting “hour power” and “we shall overcome.”
But as the politicized women exited the dorm, they were greeted with
the old-fashioned party culture in the form of a crowd of men
chanting, “We want pants [sic].”
The
most self-conscious attempt to pull together the student rights,
party, and New Left cultures came with the Unity Party campaign in
the spring of 1969. The party crossed racial lines, running the black
Campbell for president and the white Wallace for vice president. Ray
Lenzi wrote optimistically in the underground paper Big Muddy
Gazette, “The forces for change on this campus are no longer
disparate. Blacks, new left radicals, freaks, hippies, workers, and
all other progressive people can stand together supporting the
candidacy of Dwight Campbell and the Unity Party. The pieces of a
truly mass radical movement for social change have fallen
together in southern Illinois. This spring we shall capture the
initiative and change will come.”
Campbell also emphasized bringing different kinds of people together.
“We’ve got to realize that we are all students and all our
problems are intertwined. . . . To unify the campus the Party has to
have people who dig people, and this is the first thing I do.”
The
party platform that united the various student groups focused
primarily on student rights issues; of the twelve-point program the
party put forth, eight involved student rights. Other points included
hiring more black faculty members and increasing the university’s
involvement in Carbondale’s poorest neighborhoods. Significantly,
no mention was made of the war.
This effort to build a coalition of left-liberal forces proved successful,
as the Unity Party gained the endorsement of the Action Party and won
the election in a landslide.
While
the Unity Party sought to avoid the issue, other groups were anxious
to focus on the war, especially since U.S. policies in Vietnam now
had a tangible symbol on campus. In July 1969 Morris and the board of
trustees had approved the creation of the Center for Vietnamese
Studies and Programs. Widely believed to be a CIA front, the center
was financed by the Agency for International Development (AID), which
would provide $200,000 a year for five years to study ways to
reconstruct Vietnam after the war.
Appointed as the Center’s distinguished visiting professor was
Wesley Fishel, who had been part of a similar program at Michigan
State, well known for antiwar activist Robert Scheer’s 1966 exposé
in Ramparts
of the connection between the CIA and the Michigan State program.
SDS
attacked the center in its Big
Muddy Gazette,
denouncing it as an example of American imperialism and running a
drawing of a nude Delyte Morris on the front page. University
officials responded by withdrawing the permit that allowed the BMG
to be sold on campus.
In
the resulting furor, many people spoke out in defense of the BMG’s
free speech rights, including those who did not necessarily share the
paper’s politics, putting university administrators on the
defensive.
By
the fall of 1969 the convergence of the student rights movement, the
New Left, and the party culture, along with the increasing
intransigence of the administration, created a palpable tension on
campus. As one person recalled, “everyone kind of knew something
was going to happen in the fall [before the spring riots]. It was
just like all anybody could talk about at every party.”
Under Campbell’s leadership the Unity Party not only led the fight
for student rights but also sought to involve itself in the broader
community. The party inaugurated a campaign called “Serve the
People,” which sent student volunteers into Carbondale and
surrounding towns to offer a free extermination service and trash
cleanup projects.
But
the war was the elephant in the room, and it was increasingly
difficult to ignore. The reasons for student concern were as much
personal as ideological. In the words of one African American
student, “for me, the two big issues [were] the civil rights
movement and the Vietnam War, although I felt more involved in
protesting the Vietnam War. That had more of a direct impact on me
because I knew people who were dying.”
Larry Vaughn agreed: “The war in Vietnam affected me directly from
high school. I actually had older friends, brothers of friends, sons
of my parents’ friends, that had already died in Vietnam. For me it
was a real thing. That was one of the most important aspects, we knew
that we could die, that we could be killed. Y’know, it wasn’t a
joke, it wasn’t something on TV.”
As
protests against the Vietnam Studies Center mounted, Campbell and
Wallace offered the resources of student government to the antiwar
movement. In late January 1970 violence broke out in demonstrations
against the center that lasted two days and resulted in fifteen
arrests. As tension escalated, so did student rhetoric. Both Campbell
and Wallace denounced “the pig power structure,” and Wallace
declared, “We fear that the brutal and reprehensible tactics used
by police may be the beginning of a total police state at SIU.”
Students responded with the creation of a coalition to “Off Viet
Studies” and on February 20 two hundred protesters entered a
meeting of the board of trustees and demanded the removal of the
Vietnam Studies Center. In an exchange with board member E.T.
Simonds, Wallace echoed Malcolm X: “If we’re beaten again, we’ll
have to resort to self-defense in any form necessary.” When Simonds
asked, “Is that a threat, partner?” Wallace responded, “If
we’re attacked, we’ll defend ourselves. We haven’t threatened
anybody.”
That night demonstrators engaged police in a series of disturbances
that resulted in two arrests and $15,000 in damage to university
buildings and Carbondale stores.”
Four
days later Campbell and Wallace were suspended for their
participation in the protest over dorm hours. Student rights, then,
remained a central issue, and dorm hours, especially, provided a
locus for all strains of the movement. For the student rights group,
the curfew issue represented the university’s paternalism; for the
New Left, it symbolized the broader issue of powerlessness; and for
the party culture, it ruined many an evening plan. As for the war,
despite its resonance for so many students, it probably would have
remained a peripheral issue had it not been for the Vietnam Studies
Center.
But
all that changed in May 1970. On the evening of May 1, fifty people
gathered in a parking lot just off campus to protest President
Nixon’s announcement, the day before, that the U.S. military had
invaded neutral Cambodia. When the small crowd started a fire in the
street, police arrived and arrested eight people. The same night,
someone threw a firebomb into the Vietnam Studies Center.
On
Monday, May 4, Ohio National Guard troops killed four students at
Kent State University. That night SIU’s student government held an
emergency meeting and voted unanimously to join a national student
strike, with a boycott of classes to begin at noon on Wednesday. On
Tuesday two thousand students gathered at a rally in front of Morris
Library, and the administration announced that classes would be
canceled on Thursday for mourning.
The
next day another rally in front of the library drew three thousand
people. After listening to several speakers, a crowd marched through
nearby buildings, calling students to leave classes and join the
strike. About fifteen hundred strong by this time, the crowd moved to
Wheeler Hall, where the Air Force ROTC offices were located. Using
bricks from the remains of Old Main, protesters broke windows and
then occupied the building.
While Bill Moffett urged students inside Wheeler to refrain from
vandalism, others chanted, “burn it down.” Shortly after 5:00
P.M., about a thousand people marched through downtown Carbondale
before returning to campus, where they reoccupied Wheeler Hall until
they were forcibly cleared by police. In the meantime, at the request
of the sheriff, 650 National Guard troops had been sent to
Carbondale, a number that would swell to twelve hundred over the next
several days.
On
the evening of Thursday, May 7, another rally attracted two thousand
people to the front of the library. At 9:00 P.M. demonstrators
marched up Illinois Avenue and sat in at Main and Illinois, the
town’s major intersection. City and university officials informed
the demonstrators that they could remain and that traffic would be
rerouted. At this time, according to H.B. Koplowitz, the crowd was
“low-key, somewhat festive but benign.”
Speakers addressed the gathering as wine bottles circulated and
marijuana smoke wafted through the air. Monitors wandered through the
crowd, urging calm.
At
around 10:00 P.M. about seventy-five people attempted to block the
nearby railroad tracks. Carbondale’s mayor and several march
leaders pleaded with them to keep the tracks clear while most of
those sitting at Main and Illinois remained oblivious to the
controversy. At this point national guardsmen and state police
decided to move the entire crowd and began firing tear gas into the
group of demonstrators. Panic ensued as police forcibly removed the
crowd; many protesters responded by throwing bricks and smashing
windows. By the end of the night there had been seventy-nine arrests,
fifty-nine injuries, and $100,000 damage done to seventy-eight
businesses. The mayor declared a state of civil emergency and a
sundown-to-sunrise curfew.
Violent
confrontations continued for several days as students held ever
larger rallies demanding that SIU be shut down. Finally, on Tuesday,
May 12, SIU Chancellor Robert MacVicar announced to a crowd of four
thousand outside the president’s office that the university would
be closed “indefinitely.” The next morning President Morris met
with a crowd of three thousand students who encouraged him to keep
the school open; Morris announced a referendum to be held the next
day to determine whether the university would remain closed. On May
14 students voted decisively (8,224 to 3,675) to keep the university
closed.
During
this chaotic two-week period, a complex relationship developed
between the movement’s leaders and the rank and file, each group
interpreting events differently. From the leaders’ perspective the
events were not so much a riot as a student strike. In Ray Lenzi’s
words, “it was a very conscious, planned activity that was
organized. The goal was to shut down the university as a statement to
the state and the nation against the war in Vietnam and even though
definitely things got out of hand and got a little disorganized at
times . . . there were leaders with a conscious strategy who wanted
to shut SIU down.”
But
the question of leadership in SIU’s student movement was
problematic. For one thing, New Left organizations like SDS
distrusted the very idea of leadership.
Even the most hard-core politicos at SIU neither provided nor saw any
significant leadership of the student movement. Bennett recalls,
“There were no charismatic leaders . . . who could stand up and
rally the troops around [them]. This was pretty much a leaderless
movement and I just don’t think there were any substantial leaders.
There were functional leaders, people who, if a meeting needed to
occur, got it organized. In a sense, it was a mob, a leaderless
mob.”
While leaders like Ray Lenzi kept in mind the goal of a student
strike and tried to move things in that direction, events seemed much
more spontaneous to the rank and file. As one participant recalls,
“there were a couple of leaders, so to speak, people who got to
make speeches. I thought it was pretty much issue-run. I’m sure
there was somebody who said we’re going to get that together here
and have this demonstration and pass out these things, but I never
got the feeling that someone was manipulating us.”
Even some of the speakers saw events in a similar light. Jim Hanson
remembers that “people took to the streets kind of spontaneously.
From that point on, there really wasn’t any organizing to speak of.
Not to say we weren’t happy to jump in front of a crowd [and] tell
them what we wanted them to hear, but it was all very short-term
planning, like hours prior to organizing something.”
Doug
Allen, an assistant professor in the philosophy department who was
“right in the middle of things,” was also struck by the
spontaneity of events. “Things really escalated and it got to the
point that it couldn’t be controlled.”
In the end, the movement’s rank and file, imbued with the party
culture ethic, was in no mood to listen to voices of reason
encouraging restraint. Larry Vaughn recalls, “What we did is we
divided up into groups and we would roam around the streets and we
would take bricks and we would pound police cars with all these
bricks. The police cars looked like junk cars on wheels, completely
torn up. . . . We were just out there doing what [we] thought [we]
had to do.”
While
the events culminating in the student strike brought together the
various strains of SIU’s student movement, the decision to close
the university revealed the movement’s rifts. When the university
shut down, thousands of students reacted predictably. As Bill
Bojanowski put it, “It was the original street party at SIU. People
were smoking dope on the street. . . . We had our makeshift parades
going down the street. Some guy with a Nixon mask on, it was a circus
atmosphere. It was a lot of fun, nobody got hurt. . . . It was
pretty peaceful, everybody was everybody’s friend.”
But
for the more politically conscious within the movement, the closing
of the university dissipated the movement’s strength and destroyed
further opportunities for organizing. Doug Allen, for one, says he
felt let down when the school closed and everyone went home:
There
was a lot of potential, we were even talking about educational
things, priorities, and what kind of university did we want this to
be. It was exciting, sitting all day in rap sessions, exploring
different things like nonviolent resistance. . . . Normally, you’d
have a small group of people, but here [was] a huge number of people.
There was a sense of excitement building up [and then] the whole
thing toppled.
Similarly,
SDS activist Larry Bennett believes that the growing influence of the
party faction drowned out the influence of the more serious politicos
and proved counterproductive for the creation of a long-term mass
movement. According to Bennett:
None
of the Big Muddy Gazette collective or the SDS types wanted
this university closed. I think the pressure from the riots became
more of a party and it sucked in a lot of people who weren’t
politically on board and it just became like a happening, a way to be
part of something that felt like a national movement. But it sucked
up a lot of extra people and I think those people did want the
university closed and had they been in Moo and Cackle in 1966, it
would have been a panty raid. . . . I don’t think the serious
movement people thought that was the thing to do because we
understood that people are employed by the university. Close the
university, you jeopardize people’s jobs. And we were also
concerned about the way the working-class people in the surrounding
communities would actually regard the movement. We wanted to be
popular, we didn’t want to be elitist college students. . . . We
didn’t want to alienate the working class.
The
student movement did not die out altogether after the riots, but its
character did seem fixed by the events of May 1970. Two years later,
when Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong harbor, Carbondale again
erupted in riot, as more than one thousand people participated in
several days of both nonviolent and violent protests. Once again,
rank-and-file protesters often overruled the reasoned voices of
leaders. On May 10, when a crowd of about a thousand marched to the
Vietnam Studies Center and began hurling rocks at windows, Bill
Moffett confronted the demonstrators and urged nonviolence, saying,
“We cannot trash [this place] because we are going to lose and
alienate a lot of students who are against the war.” Believing his
call for restraint had worked, Moffett then asked, “Do you want to
trash?” and the crowd resoundingly answered “yes!”
In
his address at the May 6 rally in front of Morris Library, Dwight
Campbell drew a comparison between Kent State and SIU. “We need to
understand that what happened at Kent State is something we should’ve
expected a long time ago.” Referring to a January confrontation
between students and campus security forces outside the Vietnam
Studies Center at Woody Hall, Campbell said, “The only difference
between what happened here at Woody Hall and what happened at Kent
State is a matter of degree.” In conclusion Campbell urged people
to honor the dead by continuing the movement against the war. “Them
cats don’t want flowers. They want you to carry on the struggle
where they left off. Don’t just have a memorial service—have a
struggle service.”
In
echoing Wobbly martyr Joe Hill’s last words, “Don’t mourn,
organize,” Campbell’s speech placed events at SIU in context of
the long-term history of the American Left, the national mass
movement against the war in Vietnam, and the escalating conflict
between SIU students and administrators over local issues. The
convergence of national and international issues with those of purely
local significance, in Carbondale and similar places across the
country, complicates our view of the development of the New Left and
the student antiwar movement in the late sixties and early seventies.
On
the most obvious level, our study of SIU reflects the diversity of
the movement; the “prairie power” protesters of the late sixties
had different backgrounds and sensibilities from the founders of the
New Left.
In less elite institutions, where students often lacked ties to the
Old Left and where protesting meant a larger break from families and
community than it did for students from professional, middle-class
families, there was little sectarianism and a less distinct boundary
between New Left and counterculture. Clearly, in parts of the country
where the movement was too small and isolated to be able to afford
the luxury of arguing over fine points of doctrine, people learned to
work with others whose politics they did not share. And, always, the
issues were as much personal as they were political.
Our
conclusions about SIU point to the need for more studies at the
grassroots level, as it becomes clear that formal organizations such
as SDS were relatively unimportant on many campuses. The story of the
student movement is not synonymous with SDS. Such studies must also
address different components, or cultures, of the movement on various
college campuses. Surely SIU was not the only campus where a
political movement developed as on overlay of the party culture that
already existed. It was not so much that people joined the movement
simply to be “cool” or to save themselves from the draft—to
mention two of the more popular explanations for student activism. It
was, at least in part, because the protest movement was, for a time,
a way to have fun. As students became swept up in something bigger
than themselves, they discovered the joy of feeling part of a
community and taking control over the decisions that affected their
lives (living out SDS’s vision of “participatory democracy”).
Having fun was an important part of the story.
In
the wake of Kent State many young people dropped out of the movement,
as the stakes seemed too high.
But activists did more than mourn—and they did not flock to Wall
Street. Instead they struggled in new and different ways to live out
the values of the movement. In the meantime universities such as SIU
tried to deny, and sometimes to suppress actively, their own New
Left, student rights, and party traditions.
As
for the historiography of the student movement, the evidence suggests
that there is no dominant narrative that fits every case; what local
stories tell us is that the supposed anomalies are the story.
While the May 1970 riots at SIU appear in retrospect as a small piece
of a large national story in which hundreds of campuses shut down,
they were experienced at the time and at the grassroots as “a very
local affair.” For a brief moment, the party culture became
politicized enough to go beyond fighting for student rights and, in
its own way, join a larger battle for the soul of the university.
Thanks
to James Farrell for this insight.
