The Chicago Conspiracy Trial 

As 1969 bled into 1970, one of the most explosive political flashpoints, both nationally and in Madison, was the pending decision in the Chicago Conspiracy trial. Following the explosive demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention, which were turned into a bloody melee by Chicago police, “co-conspirators” were indicted based on a superficial selection of purported organizers. Caught up in the mix were the broadest peace coalition, National Mobilization Committee to End the War, the Youth International Party (a/k/a the Yippies), and, on tenuous charges, the BPP. 

The trial unfolded in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, lasting five months from September 1969 to February 18, 1970. The cantankerous judge, Julius Hoffman, like a character out of Dickens, routinely denied defense motions, while favoring all those put forward by Federal prosecutors. Two of the defendants, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman (representing the Yippies, with a style deliberately Groucho Marxist), disrupted the trial by eating jelly beans, making faces, blowing kisses, wearing outlandish clothing, and openly and loudly cracking jokes directed at the judge.

While Judge Hoffman expressed his unbridled anger at Hoffman and Rubin, he reserved special, racist animus for Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale. At one point, the judge ordered Seale bound and gagged for allegedly calling the judge a “fascist dog” and a “racist” as the Panther leader demanded separate counsel. Even so, Seale’s anger could be heard from behind his gag, embarrassing and enraging the court even more. His only connection to the demonstration was speaking at one of many rallies in a Chicago park. Judge Hoffman severed Seale’s case from the other defendants, ruling that Bobby was to be tried on riot charges (infinitely more serious), in addition to contempt of court.

In Madison, I had been tasked by the SDS chapter to help develop the propaganda effort to build campus wide support for the defense of Bobby, who we feared faced many years of incarceration. It made sense for me to take on the campaign as I had been functioning as the SDS person in charge of coordinating campus sales of the weekly Black Panther Party paper. I had assembled a squad of paper sellers who regularly sold the paper on State Street, in front of the Mifflin Street Food Co-op, and on campus. 

At our high point, our squad sold over 300 Panther papers per issue at a quarter a copy, reflecting a high degree of support among students for the Panther Party. Even more striking, I can’t remember any students taking issue with the paper, despite its angry revolutionary rhetoric attacking US capitalism and its empire. Artwork in the paper, produced by former prison artist Emory Douglas, depicted cops with pig heads surrounded by flies, support for the “Viet Cong,” and countless depictions of heavily armed black people preparing to attack the US system from top to bottom. Coordinating sales of the paper may have been what first landed me on the FBI’s radar, as the earliest entry in my 1000 page FBI file tracks a phone call from my apartment on Mifflin Street to the Panther office in Chicago. 

Emory Douglas created an iconic image of Bobby, barefoot, in prison garb, strapped to a stark wooden chair. Framing the graphic was the caption; “The fascists have already decided in advance to murder Chairman Bobby Seale in the electric chair.” This was only months before the police raid in which Seale’s Illinois deputy Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep.

I personally felt an awesome responsibility to position Bobby’s case as prominently as the other Chicago defendants, despite, or perhaps because of, his case being severed. I composed a flier, including a lengthy synopsis of the historical oppression suffered by black people in the U.S., pointing out that African-Americans suffered oppression extending from slavery through Jim Crow, now being lodged in the very DNA of white America. The flier demanded that Bobby receive a fair trial, despite our foregone conclusion that a double standard rooted in racism created an impenetrable bias in the court system, particularly with Judge Hoffman at the helm.

I must admit in retrospect, that the length of the text of the flier, combined with single-spaced print crammed onto every inch of four pages, made it virtually impossible to read with any semblance of coherence. Perhaps it didn’t matter as the stark message above the image of Bobby gagged and strapped into the chair told the story, “If he’s bound up tight, we’ll hold back the night, and there won’t be no light for days.” Not so subtly, the message foretold a violent response to a conviction.

On Madison’s East Side there was a “cooperative” print shop, organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and shared by Madison’s movement groups. The shop, dubbed the Revolutionary Printing Movement (RPM), constituted a huge step beyond our antiquated mimeograph, often hand cranked and painfully slow. (Movement print shops like RPM were popping up spontaneously around the country.)  RPM allowed for large print runs, so I took the flier there to be printed in the thousands on their hand-inked Heidelberg Davidson press. 

I had speculated that a tri-colored flier – psychedelic style - would make it stand out from the endless mountains of paper students were handed on campus every day. Hours later, to my dismay, I realized that separately hand-inking each color onto the roller became excruciatingly time consuming. I hoped, however, that the image of Bobby bound and gagged would be imprinted on students’ minds by the time his case went to trial.

In February, the air was thick with anticipation as the first major campus event unfolded – speeches by two of the Chicago defendants, wild card Jerry Rubin and John Froines, an anti-war activist who taught college chemistry in Vermont. Both were facing imminent sentencing on charges of crossing state lines to incite disorder at the Convention. While a political chasm separated serious “politicos” in SDS from the slapstick Yippies, we had made common cause to support the Chicago 7.

On the night of February 11, the cavernous Great Hall in the Student Union buzzed with excitement. Political sectarianism had been replaced with a youth culture extravaganza sponsored by the Yippies. Jerry Rubin took the stage, sporting multi-colored face paint, wearing bright green pants and an eye-shattering tie-dyed shirt. “We need to draw a line between the ‘boring death culture’ of silent America and our lifestyle. We’re not interested in working for money, or diplomas, and we don’t want to live in suburbia. We’re convinced we’re going to jail in a few days and we’re gonna laugh on the way to jail, because that’s what the revolution is all about.” 

Froines added, “The government has to be found guilty and sentenced to death. Our whole goal since the trial began is to give the Judge [Hoffman] a heart attack.” Thunderous applause. Froines wrapped it up: “I don’t think you want to listen to speeches, but I think you want to storm the Capitol. Judge Hoffman is a racist, a fascist pig. If he puts us in jail, fuck him cause we’re gonna get busted out. A country that functions as an empire, has institutionalized racism and corporate capitalism must be destroyed.”

Hundreds of students, committed warriors in support of the Conspiracy defendants, streamed out of the Great Hall. We were high on our own energy and convinced a revolution was not only possible, but inevitable. A contingent of SDSers handed each a leaflet in support of the campus General Electric protest set to jump off the very next day.

Target: GE’s Campus Recruitment

When word first spread that the notorious military contractor General Electric intended to send employment recruiters to campus in mid-February, the activist community saw it as a provocation. Just a few years earlier, radical priests and nuns had destroyed files at GE to protest/sabotage their corporate activities in support of the war.

And two years before, a couple of hundred students marched up Bascom Hill to the Commerce Building to sit-in to protest the presence of Dow Chemical recruiters on campus. Then, students still believed that the UW would respond rationally and with dialogue to their concerns, knowing Dow manufactured napalm, the burning jelly used to decimate flesh and forests. No one expected the violence of the police reaction, which led to 70 students being rushed to the hospital as the peaceful sit-in was met by club swinging cops who liberally dosed the Liberal Arts campus with barrages of blinding, thick layers of tear gas. The “Dow riot” is still remembered as a mass radicalizing experience.

From there, SDS and other campus radicals worked to expose every link between the military-industrial complex and UW. We used public speeches, daily literature tables in the student union, and door-to-door nightly canvassing, one-on-one conversations in dormitories while going room to room, editorials and articles in the Daily Cardinal, and the regular showing of movies produced by the radical film collective Newsreel. Between major events, we made systematic, day-to-day organizing a priority, more so than our academic studies.

In the February 12, 1970 Cardinal, the front page headline read, “Soglin Fears Police Violence in GE Protests.” Soglin, who had first debuted on the public stage with a highly visible arrest on the first afternoon of the Mifflin Street riots, had subsequently been elected City Alderman representing the expansive student neighborhood and was widely viewed as “our voice.”

Alderman Soglin opined in the Cardinal that he felt “apprehension that the response of the city police force to … [the] General Electric demonstration would be one of ‘extreme force and violence’.” Further, Soglin accused Mayor William Dyke of trying to isolate “the revolutionary coalition”: “There is no doubt as to the urgent action against GE. GE represents all the repressive forces which have reared their heads in the city this past week – repression of the truth, an imperialist policy … the class division within the society, motivated by capitalism and its insatiable thirst for money.” 

With his constituency pushing him, Soglin, from his perch as Alderman, hit all the right notes before the demonstration. While few of us saw the efficacy of ‘electoral politics’, Soglin’s ability to use his position to both compliment and advance the struggle on the ground, stands as an example of how the mass movement can utilize elections to expand our voices and political agenda. 

Soglin referred to “the revolutionary coalition” which had emerged despite a toxic atmosphere of in-fighting. For many days prior, political arguments over how to protest GE’s presence and what issues to focus on had sharply divided the movement. But just in time, activists joined together to engage in collective planning. In fact, the Coalition formed just hours before the planned rally and demonstration with the common goal of militantly confronting GE recruiters, forcing them off campus. The broad Coalition encompassed SDS, the Black Council, the Third World Liberation Front, Student Mobilization Committee, Young Socialist Alliance, Madison Area Peace Action Council and some independents.

To create the broadest possible alliance, tactical differences were pushed to the side in favor of political unity against the common enemy – General Electric. While SDS operated in a more militant fashion than the Madison Area Peace Action Council, for once, those differences took a back seat.  

The “crisis situation” provoked by the Mayor had proven to be the playbook for the day’s event. The police, city, county and University, had been given carte blanche to unleash their fury without restraint. In response, snow balls and stones flew over those of us on the front lines, landing on the ranks of assembled riot cops.

Determined to push us away from the Engineering building, police launched tear gas canisters in our midst, spewing the acrid fog in every direction. Through the blue haze of spreading gas, hundreds of mostly battle-hardened students who knew the drill, broke into smaller, mobile contingents, as had become our strategy for evading mass arrests. We bolted, almost instinctively, toward familiar targets, open symbols of UW's war complicity, striking back with our own fury and frustration.

T-16, the flimsy ROTC building on campus (a target of one of SDS’s “3 Demands”), came under attack. Rocks smashed against the building, shattering windows like so many egg shells. From there, the Army Math Research Center was just a short jog uphill. The AMRC building’s walls became a canvass for dozens of spray paint can wielding students, who covered the exterior walls with anti-war, anti-GE slogans, while others smashed windows with well-aimed rocks.

Moving past AMRC, we streamed back over Bascom Hill, as an unmarked City of Madison police car was smashed, overturned and burned. (Ironically, the car turned out to belong to Inspector Herman Thomas, director of police who effectively, and with venom, orchestrated the days of Mifflin Street riots in the early summer of 1969.)

We headed for the main business district of State Street and University Avenue, trashing selected businesses deemed to be particularly exploitative, such as the University Book Store, Kroger’s supermarket (a target of the grape boycott), and the First National Bank. A contingent of police trailed only steps behind - middle-aged, out of shape, unable to keep pace and under fire from barrages of rocks. One group of militants, in what must have been a pre planned attack, stealthily descended on the Air Force Recruiting Center, chanting “Off GE!” while shattering every piece of glass in front.

A lot of street education had been imparted over the course of many similar actions, effectively limiting targets to unpopular businesses and war-connected establishments. Military recruiting centers were the bull’s eye for the most ferocious and unrelenting trashing. When a few students targeted small businesses, such as Yarn Barn, they were summarily educated on the spot to avoid small businesses, many of which sympathized with our anti-war, anti-establishment philosophy.

As the day’s fury began to wane, the battle toll included eight demonstrators arrested, mostly 18- or 19-year olds, with a few in their early twenties. Five demonstrators were taken to the University hospital’s emergency room, pretty few considering the violence of the day’s events. Most were released without major injuries. At least $25,000 worth of glass lay in shards. 

The Daily Cardinal reported a press conference in the Memorial Union that evening, where representatives of the Student Mobilization Committee and SDS “placed the onus of blame for the violence entirely with the police, the University, General Electric and the ‘capitalist system in general.’ The SMC specifically charged that ‘property destruction was what could be expected of the demonstrators when their legitimate demands were ignored.’ ”

Coalition leaders further stated that there would be another rally the next day at noon on the Library Mall if GE recruiters were not gone and had not ceased their recruitment efforts. To which Chancellor Young quickly responded that he “believed that everyone who had sought an interview with the recruiter [had been] processed.” Thus concluded, at least for the moment, what had become known as the GE Strike.

But the war raged on, with corporate collusion. We could see we needed to take another step -- from militant actions to coordinated organization.

From the Ashes of SDS - Mother Jones Revolutionary League

For many of us at the core of the chapter, the unceasing battle to maintain SDS as a viable campus organization drained our energy and sucked the spirit out of the movement, leading to endless political bickering and paralysis. Political sectarianism had become a plague that spread from chapter to chapter devouring the non-doctrinaire consensus that had allowed SDS to function as a broad, inclusive coalition-based mass organization. Various political groups and tendencies retreated into their own corners with the goal of protecting their piece of turf, no matter how small.

Within a decade, the culture of the student movement had evolved from casual sweater-and-tie collegians concerned with fairness and participatory democracy, to denim-wearing, long-haired activists who assumed  that violent, confrontational conflict was now a part of everyday life.  

The question of revolution was taken just as seriously as we had once embraced Martin Luther King’s “beloved community” and non-violent climb to the mountain-top. The middle class idealization of working class youth portrayed in West Side Story dance scenes was giving way to recognition of the “quiet (and increasingly not-so-quiet) desperation” most Americans were up against in their daily struggle to partake of the ‘American dream’. 

In Madison, a grouping of like-minded activists debated how to move forward. Many of us were looking abroad to China and the worldwide Maoist movement for political guidance, as well as to the struggles for liberation in third world countries. Informal discussion groups and meetings with long agendas ran late into the night, and countless long weekends, as serious and sometimes heated discussions tried to tackle the question of how to move forward without SDS as the center of gravity for the movement. 

Losing SDS felt like coming unmoored. While we were disappointed, and perhaps even discouraged, we were still motivated by a youthful optimism that we were on track with people all over the world fighting against U.S. imperialism and for a new society. We remained hopeful and determined to find a way forward.

Many of us had already begun to study Marxism and Marxist-inspired movements and organizations. Both in class and on our own, we read the writings of Lenin and the history of the Russian revolution, of Mao and the history of the Chinese revolution. We drew inspiration from Latin American revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Many of us also studied the history of the U.S. labor movement and drew inspiration from the mighty battles for industrial unionization in the 1930’s, often led by the Communist Party U.S.A. But we wanted a new party. We were only in our late teens and early twenties, but we felt as if the movement to create a new world rested weightily on our shoulders, and to accomplish such change we needed to build a new formation that could organize and lead the struggle in Madison.

We devoted winter break 1969-1970 cloistered in intense discussions, followed by the writing and rewriting of drafts of a founding document for our yet to be constituted organization. We debated political principles, organizational form, tactics, levels of dedication, the role of leadership, and the empowerment of women in the proposed organization.  

We emerged with a dense, five-page, single-spaced, mimeographed document, entitled “Mother Jones Reborn.” Just settling on a name ended up being a herculean task in our determined effort to “get it right.” After countless hours of discussion, we agreed upon “Mother Jones Revolutionary League” - to pay tribute to the role of both women and the struggle of the U.S. working class; “Revolutionary” to dispel any misconception that we might be about simple reform, and “League” to indicate that we did not yet consider ourselves to be a full-fledged party, but held hopes of becoming a political leadership body. We greeted the launching with a sigh of collective relief, with almost the same gravity that the College of Cardinals in Vatican City await the smoke signal that denotes the naming of a new Pope.

We planned to distribute the founding statement at a public meeting to be attended by a broad array of campus activists. Days before the launch meeting, the Daily Cardinal printed an op-ed outlining our call for a new organization:

We in the movement at this point feel both an immense optimism and a tremendous frustration. Optimism because we see around us so many people in motion, so many people realizing that exploitation and oppression come from the basic nature of the American Empire. Frustration because the organizational competence of the movement has not grown nearly as fast as the consciousness or militancy of the people, and because we realize we are organizationally unprepared to lead the prolonged and costly struggle which will be necessary to achieve victory.

[The problems of] “intimidation of new people” and the “All pervasive male supremacy in the movement … makes it impossible for women and men to develop and function … The unity of the organization [SDS] was not a principled unity but one based on personal friendships or liberalism … A new organization … must balance democracy and efficiency, flexibility and discipline, honesty and tight security … We hope to provide opportunities for many people to participate in ongoing work on various levels.

We see a tremendous revolutionary potential in what has been called ‘the youth culture’.

We are united around a position that is internationalist, that recognizes the key role of Black and Brown people in leading the struggle …

We feel that we are fighting to liberate ourselves, and that we can never be finally freed until the oppressive imperialist monster has been torn up at the roots and stomped on by the people of the world … All people interested in struggle and liberation are welcome.

All power to the People … Mother Jones Revolutionary League 

In addition to the announcement in the Daily Cardinal, we plastered posters and fliers all over campus. Despite the biting winter cold, we broke into squads endeavoring to make sure that anyone who might be interested would know of the upcoming kickoff event. We knew that if there no longer was to be an SDS chapter, a lot depended on successfully launching MJRL.

On Thursday night March 12, 1970, close to 150 eager students crammed into a lecture room in Science Hall for the first meeting. Colorful revolutionary posters bedecked the walls, large speakers blared out the pounding beat of rock music, creating an atmosphere of youthful rebellion, replete with wall posters of AK47’s and Chairman Fred Hampton.  

With the playing of the Rolling Stones’ anthemic “Street Fighting Man,” all eyes were riveted on the stage. In the words of Daily Cardinal’s Leo Burt (who later gained national notoriety as one of the four members of the “New Year’s Gang” that blew up the Army Math Research Center), “Mother Jones, a new kind of revolutionary organization made up of former SDS members, and independent radicals is a mass organization based on work groups and cadres, rather than mass meetings.”

Each person received  a copy of our founding statement:

The situation in Madison is that of a youth movement growing out of a student movement whose focal point and largest source of strength is still the campus. 

Mother Jones Revolutionary League will:

[B]uild cadre which come out of the struggle. These cadre may eventually leave Madison to work in the cities, army, etc.

To raise issues in their clearest and simplest … forms. [By] mobilizing large numbers of youth around these issues, the movement acts as a critical force.

The masses and not isolated individuals make history.

The largest masses of US people are forced to confront issues if large numbers of people are mobilized around them, while they can ignore even a series of bombing as done by nuts.

a. We should continue to struggle around the three demands (smash ROTC, AMRC, LTC [Land Tenure Center].

b. We should be ready at any time to change course when a different aspect of the anti-imperialist struggle comes to the fore.

Importantly, the document goes on to outline the form of the organization: 

This is a cadre organization. The leadership of the cadre organization is the Central Committee. The cadre work through the structure of work groups which are composed of cadre and non-cadre members. 

“Work groups” required less commitment, less time, and fewer obligations. However, work group members were obligated to engage in mass work, learn self-defense, engage in criticism-self-criticism, participate in political education and submit weekly reports. Each work group was to decide its own method of operation and structure of leadership.

“Cadre” were charged with observing more stringent obligations not required of work group members. Most importantly, cadre were bound by the principle of democratic centralism to implement policies propagated by the central committee, as well as engage in criticism/self-criticism (a process of mutual evaluation by members and leaders) with the central committee to keep the CC responsible to the organization and to maintain contact between the central committee and the work groups.

The founding document set forth five work groups, which encompassed the day-to-day mass work of the organization. Two of the work groups were centered around organizing in the two large dormitory complexes: SSO and LHA. Members of these work groups were required to ascertain the issues and problems that adversely affected dorm students – “[T]he role of organizers in the dorms [is] to relate the repressive character of life in Res Halls to the more general oppressive nature of American society, and to establish causal connections between that general oppression and U.S. imperialism.”

In order to carry out work in the residence halls, floor meetings and more “personal rapping” (discussions) were to take place in both women’s and men’s dorms. Issues to discuss included topics like the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnam War, the impending Teaching Assistant Association’s strike, and importantly the women’s liberation movement that increasingly set the tone for campus activism. The charge of the dorm work group was to develop programs of ongoing political education on a regular basis in each dorm. 

Another work group focused on the student ghetto – Mifflin Street. This work group was charged with carrying out internal education, self-defense, and sponsoring a political event each week, as well as work on community projects such as improving People’s Park, assisting the food co-op, assisting the Broom Street Theater (which put on performances). Every member was required to work three hours per week in one of these institutions, and sponsor political films or other culturally and politically relevant events every Thursday night, as well as join in a mass game of Capture the Flag on Sunday afternoons in front of the Mifflin Street food co-op. 

The Women’s Group consisted of “women who do their mass work within other already existing women’s groups in the campus and community area.” As numerous newly minted women activists had coalesced in a variety of organizations and projects, MJRL embraced these new formations and pledged to take an active role in advancing the struggle for women's liberation.

The fifth group was the Propaganda Committee. Members were charged with writing newspaper columns, speaking, devising leaflets and pamphlets and designing posters, screening Newsreel films, and staffing the literature table in the Student Union.  

The founding paper concluded: “BECAUSE WE ARE EXPANDING, WE ARE ADDING NEW WORKGROUPS. IDEAS FOR NEW WORKGROUPS ARE WELCOME. PLEASE MAKE NOTE OF THESE IDEAS ON THE SIGN-UP SHEET THAT WILL BE PASSED AROUND.”

The last page of the founding document included a tribute and short biography of the organization’s namesake.

Mothers Jones was born in Cork Ireland … In 1902, Mother Jones was widely proclaimed in the U.S. press to be “the most dangerous woman in America” for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. [A] founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), she traveled from strike to strike for them until she was well over 90 years old. She was sentenced to 20 years for murder when she was 86, but popular opinion forced her release.

I told the men to stay home with the children for a change and let the women attend to the scabs [strike breakers.] I organized an army of women housekeepers. On a given day they were to bring their mops and brooms and the “army” would charge the scabs up at the mine.

Go home now. Keep away from the saloons. Save your money. You’re going to need it. (“what for,” some shouted) For GUNS. Go home and read the immortal Washington’s words to the colonists. He told those who were struggling for liberty against those who would not heed or hear ‘to buy guns. 

(The quote made the point clearly: as a revolutionary labor icon Mother Jones was close to the spirit of the Panthers.) 

To conclude the kick-off meeting, two short movies were shown – one on the Columbia University campus occupation and revolt of 1968, and the other on the Richmond, California Oil Strike that was widely supported by radical students and the Bay Area political community. Even the showing of movies at the meeting was calculated to lighten the intensity of our message, with the intent of making MJRL not just an organization, but a new, exciting center for the student movement on campus. Roughly 30 attendees signed up to become cadre and another 40 chose to be members of work groups. Considering that the time requirements and political commitment of both levels were fairly stringent, we considered our first meeting  to be a great success, as half of those in attendance had signed up. 

In a quote that appropriately sums up our launch, one of MJRL’s founders Ken Mate described the organization as “a group of people who saw [ourselves] at war.” While Kenny correctly summed up the militant dedication of those in Mother Jones, the whole picture is more nuanced. From its inception MJRL rejected the Weather brand of “individual revolutionary heroism” and its acts of isolated violence. Rather, from day one we planted our roots in painstaking day-to-day organizing and militant mass actions, believing that history is made by broad masses of people taking collective action. This squarely distinguished Weather’s hit-and-run ideology from the Panthers - and us.

We considered mass actions not as an end in themselves, but as a means toward leading the day-to-day battles of students, while drawing out broader political lessons about “the system” and its endemic failures.   

In one of my “independent study classes” (in which we never attended class, but read and wrote about whatever we wanted), I did an exhaustive study of the United Fruit Company and the role of Banana-Boat Diplomacy in Latin America. Through my research, the true nature of U.S overseas interests and foreign policy became increasingly clear to me. Fundamentally, the United States’ entire history was rooted in the steady growth of an imperialist system that sought to dominate greater and greater world resources for its own empire building.

While I focused my research on the U.S. organized overthrow of the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala to be replaced by an authoritarian dictatorship, I also examined the extensive history of armed U.S. intervention in the affairs of independent, sovereign governments south of the U.S. border. My studies  aligned with MLRJ’s conviction that we were fighting much more than bad governmental policies, but the cancer of imperialism that determined both domestic and foreign policy.

Teaching Assistants Strike

Not long after the founding of MJRL, we faced our first major campus struggle with the impending Teaching Assistant Association (TAA) strike. The TAA was initially formed by graduate students as a nascent union in May of 1966 following an anti-draft sit-in in Bascom Hall. Graduate students who had participated in the sit-in were inspired by the collective anti-war action to look at their own working conditions. In June, a small core of dedicated activists gathered to form the TAA, making the TAA the first graduate student labor union in the U.S.

On the Madison campus, graduate students found themselves taking on many of the obligations of teaching classes, but with only minimal compensation and few rights. As word of the union spread, 1100 of 1900 teaching assistants signed up to join. On May 19, 1969, 77% of teaching assistants on the Madison campus voted in support of joining the union under an election held by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. In the face of overwhelming solidarity and determination by the union’s membership, as well as support from many undergraduates who sympathized with the demands of the teaching assistants, the University reluctantly granted voluntary recognition.

The newly recognized TAA commenced bargaining, but made little progress with an intransigent administration that balked at any concessions. The last thing the University Administration wanted, in the face of a campus barely within their control to begin with, was a union of graduate students with the power to determine educational policy and course planning. Negotiations crawled on for six months.

After long months of futile negotiations, with frustration growing among its membership, the TAA set January 8, 1970 as a bargaining deadline to be followed by “unspecified actions.” With both sides remaining intransigent, the TAA set March 15 as the strike deadline. With the real threat of the first teaching assistants’ strike in the nation, professors and the UW Administration dug in, hardening their bargaining position. Professors involved in the bargaining took umbrage at being addressed by TAA union negotiators by their first names, judging “informality” as an unwanted intrusion to their unimpeded, sacrosanct authority in the university hierarchy. 

These were exciting times for the newly formed MJRL. The setting of a strike deadline triggered a series of organization meetings in which we developed plans to both physically assist the impending strike, and  advance our self-proclaimed political mission to make the strike about more than bread and butter demands. At the same time we committed our full-throated support for the union, we publicly urged the TAA to not forget its origins in the campus anti-draft movement and the 1967 anti-Dow Chemical sit-in. 

I was recruited for a committee to draft a flier setting forth our support for the strike, and to draft Mother Jones’ position regarding the union and strike strategy:

TAA and the WORLD REVOLUTION

If we want to effectively challenge or shut down the University of Wisconsin, we must understand clearly the function that it serves. We labor under a misconception if we believe that the function of the Amerikan university is to educate. The university in fact has two major functions: to train technocrats and bureaucrats to fill the slots in the economy, and to do research for private corporations, the military, and the government.

The ideology fostered in every classroom is a class- based ideology, based on elitist, white supremacist, and male supremacist notions of what culture is, how history has been made, and what our society looks like. 

Most flagrant of all, the university, through institutions like the Army Math Research Center and ROTC, supply the tools necessary for a small ruling class of old rich white Amerikan men to repress the rising people of the world. The motto of the University of Wisconsin might as well be, “Power to the few, training for the few more to do the shitwork, repression, channeling, or murder for everybody else.” 

The Administration is trying to break the TA Union. This should be no surprise, for every day the Land Tenure Center works on methods to break unions in Peru. The Administration will no doubt use the police or national guardsmen to break the strike and surppress(sic) protest. No surprise, for every day in ROTC CLASSES THE UNIVERSITY TRAINS PEOPLE TO ACT AS THE POLICE OF THE WORLD.

The tentacles that try to break the TA struggle here on campus come from the very same body as the tentacles which defoliate the jungles of Viet Nam, commit genocide on Black people, and relegate women to secondary roles in society. 

Now is the time to unite with real friends against the common enemy. ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE; FREE THE MILWUAKEE 3 (3 Black Panther Party members on trial for murder in Milwaukee); VICTORY TO THE NLF (National Liberation Front in Vietnam). 

In the dead, frigid Madison winter, Mother Jones members blanketed the campus from the liberal arts buildings on one end to the Ag and Engineering buildings on the other with thousands of copies of our flier. The flier sparked hundreds of animated, often controversial, conversations with fellow students about why a labor union for teaching assistants, as well as heated discussions of issues such as our three demands - ousting ROTC, AMRC and the LTC from campus. Icy lawns and sidewalks, classrooms and dorms became the forum for countless debates about the strike and its broader political implications. 

Today some people reading the leaflet might question whether our rhetoric linking the TAA strike with “outside” issues was on the mark. We ourselves believed that the pending strike constituted one cog in the unfolding worldwide struggle against U.S. imperialism. While we unequivocally supported the TAA’s “bread and butter demands”,  pledging to be the “first on and last off” the picket lines, we affirmatively linked the strike to a myriad of the fault lines in U.S. society and worldwide.

Tensions rose as both sides dug in and a strike became inevitable. In a leadership meeting, we set March 16 as the day for MJRL to make its support widely and visibly known, this being the first time our new campus organization debuted on the public arena. At an early morning kick-off rally, the Mother Jones speaker pledged to observe TAA principles to picket “peacefully and non-obstructively.” After pledging  support for the union, the Mother Jones speaker continued,  “ROTC, Army Math, GE and oil company recruiters are all part and parcel of the university. They murder and oppress the people of the world, and pollute its environment ... CALL IT IMPERIALISM!” 

With that, we took to the streets and campus walkways in roving pickets, carrying colorful revolutionary posters, chanting and leafleting in support of the strike. Around mid-morning, forty of us marched to the Army Math Research Center for a rally.

After an hour at AMRC, we took off on a two-hour march around the campus, chanting, singing and handing out pamphlets entitled “The Case Against Army Math.” The most populated picket line formed at the top of Bascom Hill where class attendance dropped appreciably. As we continued to march from university building to building, followed in tow by about a half dozen plainclothes police, we joined TA picket lines, drawing dozens, if not hundreds of students to join us. As planned, we ended our march at Van Vleck Hall where we joined a spirited noon rally of TAA strikers and supporters. 

According to a Daily Cardinal article, “Some TAA pickets objected to the presence of Mother Jones picketers, claiming that ‘they should support the strike on our terms’.” In response, TAA President Robert Muehlenkamp responded that, “the terms of the TAA were not exclusive of those of the League, and that the TAA welcomed its support.” To his credit, Muehlenkamp refused to succumb to red-baiting attacks from conservative TA’s seeking to drive a wedge between Mother Jones and the strikers. 

For the first week of the strike, individual TA’s engaged in a concerted effort to reach out to students of every persuasion, engaging in hundreds of one-on-one discussions seeking to educate many for the first time about the nature of a “labor action,” and why students  should honor the picket line. For that first week, students boycotted classes en masse, many joining the first picket lines of their lives. Others, who crossed the lines, were introduced to the time-honored labor term “scab” (strikebreaker), as they were heckled and booed for crossing the line.

Nightly we met to assign MJRL members to strategically shore up picket lines, designating particular buildings as crucial to shutting down the campus. We honored our pledge and daily joined the lines, abiding by the union’s request to refrain from violence and confrontation, even as increasing numbers of students crossed the picket lines. For the first week, however, momentum in support of the strike held strong. Teamsters Local 695 honored picket lines, refusing to make deliveries, in a dramatic demonstration of union solidarity, never before witnessed by most students. Other campus unions, however, did not heed the call for solidarity and refused to honor the lines, dampening strike spirit.

After the first week, however, frustration escalated. A “Radical Caucus” within the TAA initiated a call for more aggressive tactics, including blocking building entrances. The Chemistry Building became known as a “combat zone”. The picket line became  increasingly militant, with strikers and supporters pounding on cars in an effort to impede their morning drive to work. At night, a well placed shot from a high powered rifle pierced the liquid nitrogen tank adjacent to the Chemistry building, as if to punctuate the battle zone moniker.

On March 24, TAA President Muehlenkamp, and a handful of radical TAs at 2 sites, sought to up the ante by physically blocking campus deliveries and were promptly arrested. In response, Chancellor Young branded the strike illegal under state law and severed negotiations. 

The Administration, in collaboration with the State Attorney General, sought a court order to enjoin the strike, vowing  to never  “give up governance of the University”. A Circuit Court Judge granted the Attorney General’s petition for injunctive relief and ordered striking TAs to return to classes. For many students, still naive as to the class nature of the U.S. legal system, the court’s injunction highlighted the partisan position of courts in favoring management’s side in a labor dispute - as Mother Jones had written “just one cog” in a broader class conflict. 

In violation of the injunction, however, the strike held strong. On April 1st, the university retaliated by reducing the pay of 300 of the most active TAs, while threatening to curb the pay of others. Chancellor Young, quoted in the Daily Cardinal, called  the TAA “completely ruthless,” while ordering  union members back to work, again reiterating that the administration would never capitulate to the TAA’s demand for a voice in controlling academic content on “his” campus. In a stinging, in-your-face rebuke, the TAA Steward’s Council rejected the Chancellor’s ultimatum.

On April 6, in what the administration considered a major concession, UW bargainers agreed that individual TAs in academic departments would be allowed, as individuals, to negotiate academic content, but not on behalf of, or in league with, the union. The offer was immediately dismissed as a cynical ploy to separate individual teaching assistants from the broader membership.

By way of retaliation, twenty-one TAs were hauled into court and held in contempt, each being slapped with a fine of $250. The basis for allegations against the 21 were sworn affidavits signed by department chairs who had taken it upon themselves to surreptitiously surveil  classrooms to observe whether TAs had returned to work. Based on their scouting, affidavits were entered into the court record resulting in monetary fines for violation of the injunction, accompanied by punishing threats of additional monetary penalties. 

On April 7, the TAA begrudgingly voted against continuing the strike and accepted the university’s latest offer in a vote of 534-348. Thus ended the 24-day strike, with significant bread and butter gains such as full union recognition with bargaining rights, job security, a grievance procedure and health insurance, but not any role in planning curriculum. There was some bitterness, particularly among the 348 TAs who voted to continue the strike. But the Madison TAA had secured a significant victory, marked by the most advanced organization among teaching assistants throughout the country, a pattern to subsequently be followed by teaching assistants at other colleges and universities. .

Buoyed by the final cessation of the strike, the faculty held a “celebratory party” on Friday afternoon to savour their victory. Not all parties to the strike, however, were in the mood to celebrate. Early Saturday morning, while darkness still blanketed the streets, the homes of four department heads who had signed court affidavits were vandalized and their windows smashed with bricks.

Nixon Invades Cambodia - Campuses Erupt - 4 Dead at Kent State

A mere few weeks of relative calm followed the TA strike. With a year of pitched battles over our demands to expel on-campus institutions tied to the military (too many to detail in this memoir), it was only a matter of time for the next flashpoint to arise. On April 30th, in a national news broadcast, President Nixon announced that a “joint” force of U.S. and South Vietnamese troops had invaded Cambodia to root out ‘Communist sanctuaries’ along the border, intending to bomb into oblivion fabled command-and-control centers hidden deep in the jungle. 

Polls conducted among students just prior to the invasion sought response to the question – “Is the war in Vietnam pure imperialism?” 41% agreed with the ‘imperialist’ characterization of the war, up from a mere 16% in spring 1969. With almost one-half of students branding the Vietnam War as imperialist, Nixon’s escalation stoked widespread fury and condemnation. 

May 1, the day after the invasion, 500 Kent State SDSers and other anti-war militants gathered on the Commons - a grassy knoll at the center of campus. Speakers condemned Nixon’s warmongering expansion of the battlefield into Cambodia, despite his duplicitous election promise to end the War. A follow-up rally was announced for May 4 to “bring the war home.”

Over the weekend, the activist grapevine that stretched from coast to coast buzzed with outrage. Spontaneous demonstrations erupted on far flung campuses. Despite final exams around the corner, Mother Jones cadre and work group members met in darkened apartments and behind closed doors with rock music blaring to thwart the listening devices that we feared had been planted by the authorities to conduct surveillance.  

While the organization itself had existed for little over six weeks, we were all veterans. We had spent years, either as members of SDS, or most recently Mother Jones, reaching out to educate students on the Madison campus to the imperialist nature of the war in Southeast Asia. The military expansion into Cambodia fit squarely with the profile of U.S. imperialism as an aggressive, hegemonic power fueled by the need to dominate expanding spheres of influence.  

With his announcement, Nixon had thrown down the gauntlet; it was now or never for the Madison anti-war, anti-imperialist movement to respond with greater fury and more massive  resistance than ever before. If 41% of students surveyed agreed with the ‘imperialistic’ characterization of the war, we fully expected that the painstaking educational work we had engaged in over the prior years would now result in a massive outpouring of organized and sustained revolt on the Madison campus. 

At Kent State, students organized for their planned Monday demonstration. University officials, hoping to thwart the gathering, distributed 12,000 misinformation fliers that claimed the event had been cancelled. The Administration’s ploy notwithstanding, 2000 protestors gathered in the Commons. As the first protester spoke, the National Guard attempted to disperse the crowd. 

Campus patrolman Harold Rice, riding in a National Guard jeep, read an order to “disperse or face arrest.” Defiant protestors responded by unleashing a barrage of rocks, forcing Rice’s jeep to beat a hasty retreat. Most protestors refused to give ground; the Guard unleashed a heavy barrage of tear gas. 77 Guardsmen, with fixed bayonets on their M1 Garand rifles, advanced on the hundreds of protestors holding the knoll.

Without any threat to life, without any provocation to justify his actions, Sergeant Myron Pryor indiscriminately fired at the demonstrators with his .45 pistol. Guardsmen nearest the students turned and fired their high-powered M1 Garands into the unarmed crowd. The firing lasted 13 seconds, discharging an estimated 67 deadly ammunition rounds. In the blink of an eye, the Guardsmen massacred four, wounding nine – all defenseless against .30 caliber M1 rounds that ripped through their bodies like butter. 

The cold-blooded murders rang out like a shot heard round the world. The deaths of four young compatriots reverberated as a primal scream heard by youth on college and high school campuses across the country. Upon hearing news of the shootings, Mother Jones leader Ken Mate recounted, “[T]he entire university headed to Bascom Hill which, as the highest and most central point on campus, was a popular place for rallies and marches. I glanced northwest toward the Lakeshore Dorms seeing the entire stretch, more than a mile, black with people. Looking in the opposite direction toward the Southeast Dorms, I saw the same thing.” 

The initial reaction in Madison was spontaneous with close to ten thousand students gathering on campus and taking to the streets. Nearly one-third of the student body knew the drill and needed little prompting to raise hell. Quickly, a broad spectrum of political organizations, including the WSA student government, formed a broad United Front to develop a coordinated, collective, organized response. The call for the United Front read:

In light of the crisis provoked by the intensified war in Vietnam, Cambodia and the rest of SouthEast Asia and the intensified repression in this country a national general strike of university communities has already begun. In Madison the United Front has been formed to aid in implementing this strike. [Emphasis added.] 

In conjunction with the National Demand [to bring the G.I.’s home], the Madison United Front added four specific demands:  

1. WE DEMAND IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL FROM S.E. ASIA.

2. WE DEMAND THAT ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS BE SET FREE AND THAT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PAY $30,000 RANSOM FOR THE MILWAUKEE 3. [3 Panthers framed for attempted murder of police.]

3. WE DEMAND AN END TO UNIVERSITY PARTICIPATION IN THE WAR MACHINERY – INCLUDING: AN END TO ALL MILITARY RESEARCH AND THE IMMEDIATE SHUTTING DOWN OF ROTC AND THE ARMY MATH RESEARCH CENTER.

4. WE OPPOSE THE OPPRESSION BY U.S. CORPORATIONS OF WORKERS AND PEASANTS AT HOME AND ABROAD; AND WE DEMAND THE END OF GOVERNMENT STRIKE BREAKING ACTIVITIES, AND SUPPORT THE RIGHT OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEES TO STRIKE. [Emphasis added]

The United Front (UF) urges all community groups to join us and actively support these demands. The UF calls for a strike that will surpass anything previously achieved at the University. This time we must SHUT THE UNIVERSITY DOWN – not just classes, but research as well. [Emphasis added.] We will begin [to take] this struggle to the working community of Madison, to their offices, factories, and homes. We recognize that THIS IS THE TIME for a national network of strikes, unprecedented in size and determination.

The United Front urges a GENERAL MOBILIZATION OF ALL PEOPLE TO STRIKE and oppose the oppressors. [Emphasis added.]

The inclusion of second Demand, particular to the Madison UF, represented the successful culmination of protracted, day-to-day educational work building opposition to the oppression of peoples of color and in support of the struggle for black liberation, particularly defense of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale, and the Milwaukee 3. Personally, I felt rewarded that my efforts to coordinate sales of the Black Panther paper had paid off by inclusion of Demand #2. 

On Monday May 4th, the United Front announced an evening rally to kick off the strike. All day the campus buzzed with anticipation and expectation. Virtually every conversation entailed discussion of the invasion of Cambodia, the murder of the four at Kent State, and what would happen next in Madison. We all knew this wasn’t a drill.

As the evening wore on, demonstrators gathered on the Terrace behind the Student Union, overlooking placid, bucolic lake Mendota. Mingling with the agitated crowd of 3000, I felt a wave of palpable anger engulf me. We all shared a collective visceral rage with a short fuse. Students were ready to not just strike, but to avenge our fallen Kent comrades. Their deaths could have been any of our deaths. Gazing at Lake Mendota, I couldn’t help but think that the quiet ripples of the water belied a calm soon to be shattered by the rage of thousands.

Taking the mic, Andy Himes, VP of the Wisconsin Student Association, outlined the United Front’s four demands, “This time we must shut the University down. Not just classes but research as well.” Next up, well-respected Daily Cardinal Contributing Editor James Rowen, the journalist who had uncovered Army Math’s ties to the military, warned, “We’re going to fight the military on this campus and we’re going to strike hard and we’re going to win!” A collective guttural roar from deep within each of us arose from the increasingly agitated crowd. 

Billy Kaplan, speaking for Mother Jones, angrily accused the U.S. of  “waging a war of genocide against the people of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.” With a clenched fist raised high, he rallied the crowd, “Victory to the Pathet Lao, Victory to the NLF (National Liberation Front of Vietnam), Victory to the Cambodian peoples.” 

Billy’s words struck a chord. After months and years of patient education into the nature of the capitalist system and U.S. imperialism by SDS cadre who had spent many nights going door-to-door rapping with dorm residents, many on the Terrace viewed the insurgencies in S.E. Asia as legitimate wars of national liberation by third world nations. Sensing the restlessness, and readiness of the crowd, another speaker from Mother Jones took the mic and prompted the crowd - “Why don’t we take a stroll over to the math research building?” 

The assembly needed little prompting; thousands began rhythmically clapping and chanting “Free Bobby Seale!” and “Army Math Off Campus!” Anxious to take action, the bulk of demonstrators headed toward the Army Math building. As we rounded the corner from behind the Union, we were momentarily blocked by a small contingent of University police.

Mother Jones cadre jumped to the lead. With a collective roar of “Smash Army Math”, we pushed aside campus police and headed for AMRC. At Army Math, we again overpowered a contingent of campus police, tagged the building with anti-war slogans and took off running towards the T-16 ROTC training building. We easily out paced the out-of-shape campus cops, leaving them behind. 

T-16 had come to symbolize the war machine on campus, often being targeted. We arrived with no police in sight. The crowd was relentless, shattering most every window; fires were set in trash cans, as well as a bulletin board inside the building. The trashing continued; desks were overturned and files knocked aside. Nothing could bring back our four dead comrades, but destroying T-16 symbolized the rage we all felt. Police soon arrived, stockpiled with a copious supply of tear gas, with which they blanketed the area. Gasping for air, as few had prepared for the gas (an omission not to be repeated), the main crowd dispersed. 

Leaving T-16 behind, we divided into smaller groups for mobility and headed back towards Library Mall; street skirmishes broke out. Demonstrators bombarded police with barrages of rocks and debris. The police retaliated with limitless rounds of tear gas. As students, many of whom had not attended the kick-off demonstration, attempted to flee the unfolding battle, University cops, Madison police, and County Sheriffs wailed on people, swinging long riot clubs indiscriminately. Those who hadn’t yet learned to stick with an affinity group, found themselves being pursued by police who targeted lone individuals as easy prey.

In another area of campus, a firebomb attack was launched against the Land Tenure Center. Although police reported that damage was minimal, few windows survived the assault. At around 10 that night, after hours of firing round upon round of tear gas directly into the Memorial Union, breathing became impossible. The first two floors were inundated with clouds of gas with nowhere to go but hang in the air like noxious belch. Hundreds of students, many previously not involved, streamed out of the Union choking, crying, and coughing, with some retching uncontrollably. 

The tally after night one - seven arrested, six charged with disorderly conduct and one with criminal damage to property. By midnight, having suffered enormous quantities of tear gas, nine persons were treated for gas inhalation at the University Hospital and two others were admitted indefinitely for head and abdominal injuries.

Tuesday, we awoke to news that Governor Knowles had mobilized the National Guard, eventually totaling 1800 troops. Chancellor Young endorsed the Guard call-up so that “police don’t feel outnumbered when surrounded by a mob.” Young convened a press conference to issue a: “declaration of immediate danger on the Madison campus … after a day of violent confrontation between students and police during which the campus was saturated with tear gas.”

Young’s declaration restricted presence on campus to faculty, staff, police, and reporters. Persons were required to show identification upon request by a police officer or “other personnel responsible for law enforcement.” The declaration carried severe consequences as bayonet equipped Guardsmen were assigned to patrol campus buildings. Any person refusing to show identification was subject to arrest and financial penalties. 

Tuesday’s strike unfolded slowly, lacking organization. Events had outpaced our ability to provide organized leadership. While Mother Jones cadre, and other disciplined activists arrived early, disrupting classes and calling on non-striking students to shut the University down, momentum dipped overnight. Class attendance remained as high as 50%. 

We shifted tactics and divided into two large groups, several hundred each; the first disrupted traffic, drawing police away from campus buildings. The other blocked entrances to liberal arts buildings - Social Science, Bascom Hall, Commerce and Van Hise.  

By 1p.m. 3000 regrouped at Van Vleck plaza. “The morning was fucked up,” complained a speaker. “People have got to get together in tight groups – that’s the only way we won’t get ripped off.” Subsequent speakers warned the crowd, “We didn’t come out here for a picnic. This is for real, this is for our brothers and sisters at Kent State!” Black students, members of the United Front, announced their full endorsement of the strike, but added a qualifier - “we’re out here for real; we ain’t here for no bullshit.”

All 3000 headed toward the Monroe Street Draft Board – a target uniformly hated for its role in filling the ranks of the military. In the words of the Daily Cardinal, “[T]he clash ... [at the draft board] was of furious intensity, as students pelted police with hails of rocks. Rapidly shifting winds rendered police tear gas ineffective. Students were eventually dispersed by club wielding police.” 

Within an hour of being driven back from the draft board, we regrouped en masse on Bascom Hill, going on offense with massive stoning of police gathered on Park Street. The police retaliated with volley after volley of gas, clearing the Hill as we were forced to disperse. As soon as the gas dissipated, we regrouped, and converged on Bascom Hill for another pitched battle. 

We battled furiously - rocks vs. gas, kids vs. cops, bare skulls vs. riot sticks - as we moved toward Library Mall and the Memorial Union. Again, the police laid down such heavy clouds of gas, breathing became impossible as gagging and vomiting students retreated into the Union. Caught up in the melee were not just demonstrators, but bystanders who felt the sting of gas on their skin and the burn in their lungs. 

Gas canisters rained down like a plague of locust, as students tripped over each other trying to make it to the safety of the Memorial Union. Organized affinity groups, pulled together by veterans of many such battles, endeavored to provide cover for those fleeing by throwing canisters back at police, but were soon overwhelmed.

Around 10:30 p.m., we had been in the streets for almost fourteen hours, engaged in tit-for-tat battles with city police and campus cops. With no respite on the horizon, Dane County Sheriff Jack Leslie and his mob of Deputy Sheriffs arrived in large, elephantine-like vans. The doors flew open and frenzied Sheriffs jumped out, attracted by the thrill of blood-letting and head-bashing. With the energy of fresh troops entering the battle, Sheriffs indiscriminately beat anyone within the reach of a riot club. Lone individuals, many of whom were merely walking by, didn’t stand a chance as Sheriffs cornered and mercilessly beat them.  

I remember being on the Mall that night, the images leaving a lasting impression on me over fifty years later. All around me thick clouds of gas hung in the night air; kids yelled for their affinity groups to reassemble and issued warnings to those walking alone to be careful. The area was pitch dark, with the exception of hazy headlight beams, the gas refracting the light. The ground was strewn with dozens, if not hundreds, of spent gas canisters, lying next to shattered glass and rocks of every size.  

I watched, flabbergasted, as squad cars, sirens blaring and lights flashing, suddenly veered from the city streets, violently bounced over the curb with the car bottoming out on concrete as the sound of scraping metal added to the cacophony of chaos. Despite considering myself a veteran of many similar encounters, I watched in horror, shocked at the fury with which squad cars gave chase to demonstrators running pell mell in all directions. Our anger, manifested throughout the day in pitched battles, was now repaid without mercy by Deputy Sheriffs under the cover of darkness. The Deputies made no pretense of being there to enforce the law, rather they were there to crack skulls.

In a yet unused tactic, Sheriffs carried a newly unveiled pepper fogger into the Rathskeller Pub fiercely emitting blinding clouds of aerosolized streams of gas that spewed out with the force of a high-pressure fire hose. The Union, no longer off-limits for law enforcement, became so inundated with gas that a faculty couple with a baby evacuated with their choking child gagging and gasping for breath.

Earlier, the Daily Cardinal had accused the local Kroger’s supermarket on University Avenue of grossly overcharging students. In retaliation, some unknown warrior torched the Twinkie section, lighting up the store and the night skies up like a roman candle. Students, feeling vindicated for having retaliated for years of price gouging, snake-danced in glee around the burning building.

An Editorial in the Daily Cardinal read:

revolutionary reminders

It would benefit all persons involved in the strike to keep these revolutionary reminders in mind.

1)  People should get themselves into small action groups of friends. The police have developed a much used tactic of busting individuals. Staying together in tight groups will help prevent individual arrests. Your small group should have a collective name which people should use to identify each other.

2) Do not trash small businesses – keep in mind that the enemy is the imperialist system and that is what the strike is opposing. Be disciplined. [Emphasis added.]

3)  Do not endanger others in the strike, both with careless actions and escalating tactics in the middle of a crowd which may not be prepared to follow and which would be trapped in the heavier police response your action would invite. 

4)  Remember the National Guard can and may shoot to kill. [Emphasis added.] However, keep in mind that many are young, draft dodgers, and opposed to the war in Vietnam. These Guardsmen should be spoken to if possible. Past experience has shown them to be far more responsive to communication than the local police.

Wednesday evening, a huge, highly-charged crowd of 5000 massed on the Terrace. Students, tightly packed together, were largely organized into “small action groups”, as promoted in the Cardinal’s “revolutionary reminders”. We impatiently listened to a few short speeches; suspense and anticipation filled the air. The tension was palpable as all knew that once we left the relative safety of the Terrace, we would enter a war zone, no longer protected by the unofficial DMZ that divided the Terrace from streets in front of the Union. 

As we had planned at an earlier Mother Jones meeting, I and other cadre positioned ourselves in the front as the crowd swung around the side of the Union. As we rounded the corner, with thousands behind us, we ran smack into a solid wall of assembled riot cops, ranks tight, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, riot gear fully on display. As the two opposing camps warily eyed each other, the distance between us rapidly diminished; neither side flinched. 

Our only direction was forward; we braced for impact. When the two lines collided, those of us in front lowered our heads and pushed through to create openings for the crowd to break the police line. In preparation, instructions at our Mother Jones meeting had been to stuff rolled up newspapers and cardboard into our shirtsleeves to provide a modicum of protection from the impact of riot clubs.

With my arms folded over my head to block blows from saps and clubs, we advanced with unbending determination to breach police lines. Upon an order from their commanding officer, gas masks were pulled down; a heavy barrage of tear gas was discharged, canisters exploding below our feet to block our forward motion. We had learned that a mixture of water, eggs and baking soda provided some protection from the worst effects of the gas. Most carried little plastic bags with soaked bandannas, which we quickly tied over our mouths and noses. 

Skirmishing as we pushed steadily forward, we successfully broke through the police lines. Roughly 4000 to 5000 regrouped at the S.E. dorm area for a rally initiated by United Front  Committee for the Liberation of the Southeast Area Dorms. Hundreds of students from the three multi-story dorm complex had built defensive barricades in the heavily trafficked surrounding streets, using construction materials intended for the new Communications building.

Confrontation jumped off when some of the dorm students set the barricades on fire. Guardsmen rushed to the burning barricades like moths to a flame, firing multiple rounds of CS gas from mortars deployed at a distance. CS gas, considerably more potent than tear gas, released a powdery-like substance considered a ‘persistent chemical agent’, meaning it stuck to clothing and exposed skin and continued to be highly potent for hours. The CS particulates not only disabled those hit directly, but caused others in close proximity to suffer the same burning irritation on skin and in eyes. 

Unleashing their new tactic of firing CS canisters from motors, Guardsmen remained beyond reach of our projectiles, while steadily bombarding us. It created an eerie silhouette as we could just barely make out the outlines of mortars being manned by faceless Guardsmen, akin to T.V. images of Vietnam battlefields. We ran and dodged, trying out best to remain out of range of the CS gas exploding all around us. In the darkness, it was impossible to see incoming rounds until they were already exploding at our feet. Even worse were the injuries suffered by some as their unprotected heads and bodies were hit by flying mortar shells.

Dispersed by the toxicity of the CS gas, we shifted to mobile hit-and-run tactics, using Molotov cocktails and rocks to circle behind the Guardsmen, unleash an attack and fade away. In retaliation, the Guard broke out more grenade launchers, lobbing seemingly endless supplies of CS canisters, forcing us to break and run, while trying to keep our affinity groups organized. When groups were dispersed under relentless bombardment, you’d hear names de guerre like Che, or [Chairman] Fred or Ho; signals for affinity groups to regroup in the darkness. 

As we tried our best to hide and outmaneuver police and Guardsmen, green Guard helicopters took to the sky shining down super intense “block lights”. (The name “block light” derived from a single beam bright enough to light an entire city block.) Not only were we dodging canisters raining down, but our ability to hide in the shadows was jeopardized by eerie, blinding beams of light shining down from helicopters hovering just overhead.

Unable to hold the area, some of us headed to home territory in Mifflin/Basset, while others retreated into the S.E. dorms. As students hung out the windows berating Guardsmen and police, a concussion grenade exploded breaking a third floor window in Ogg hall east. Another concussion grenade was launched directly at a cluster of demonstrators in front of the dorms, breaking one protestor’s arm. His comrades whisked him inside out of harm’s way. 

Hoping to gain tactical advantage, campus Protection and Security, maneuvered to occupy the S.E. Commons as a staging area. From upper floors of dorms, projectiles rained relentlessly down on them as they ducked and dodged, surprised by the sudden sneak attack. A contingent of supportive House Fellows vetoed the idea of allowing the Commons to be used as a staging area and succeeded in driving campus police and Guard out of the area. 

At around 1a.m., five hours after we had broken through police lines at the Union, House Fellows in Sellery Hall canvassed room-by-room to stop students from throwing objects out the windows. Slowly, the siege of S.E. dorms resided in the early morning hours as the Guard lifted its encirclement and the evening’s battle drew to a close; 19 had been arrested and multiple others received emergency treatment at University and Madison General hospitals.

The front page of the Cardinal read: 

Barricades, Fires Escalate Violence

National and local momentum steadily grew as increasing numbers of campuses joined the general strike. In Madison, it inescapably felt like we were engaged in a full-scale war with law enforcement. Madison was effectively under 24/7 occupation by a full mobilization of University and City police, Dane County Sheriffs, plus large contingents of Guardsmen. With the Cardinal describing Wednesday as “guerilla warfare with both young persons and lawmen escalating tactics”, much of the confrontation moved under the cover of darkness.

In a summation of the week’s events, the Cardinal ran the headline, “Rightest Vigilante Groups Escalate Street Violence”. In the words of a staff writer, “Groups of possible right wing individuals have reportedly … [been] beating up people in the streets and launching offensives into apartments.” The article quoted an unnamed student, “Watch out for these [right-wing] search and destroy missions. People should be aware that this is going on and not walk alone at night. These guys ride around in cars, and jump people in the streets.”

In a new development, right wing thugs, “recruited, tanked up, and regrouped in bars, particularly Chesty’s and the Pub”, both known for catering to super-conservative patrons. Pro-war bullies from Chesty’s entertained themselves by randomly throwing rocks at people on porches across the street. One of the Chesty’s crowd randomly darted across the street to attack a kid on a balcony, carrying an iron club, which he then threw at a window.

On the same night, three men in their early twenties tried to force their way into apartments on State Street. They demanded possession of an American flag flying from the roof. Being denied the flag, they threatened to return with recruits from the Pub. Within minutes, they reemerged with about 20 drunken recruits and tried to force their way into apartments on State Street. The residents, now prepared for the onslaught, had gathered a small “arsenal” to defend themselves, and scattered the would-be attackers.

Several other similar incidents occured around campus mostly marked by a few distinctive commonalities. The right-wing, pro-war thugs usually required liquor to embolden themselves and attacked only when their greater numbers stacked the odds. Fortunately, most on our side traveled in affinity groups for protection from the cops, but the same affinity groups functioned as a safeguard against right-wing thugs.  

With campuses across the nation in an unabated uproar, the Madison rebellion settled into a routine. Daily in the streets and in front of classroom buildings, demonstrators waged ongoing tit-for-tat warfare with local and county law enforcement, supported by the 1800 National Guardsmen, mostly rural boys looking like fish out of water, quite a few of whom had joined the Guard to escape serving in Vietnam. Predictably, strikers fanned out across campus setting up obstructive picket lines. Once dispersed by police, strikers, adhering to prearranged plans, reconvened picket lines at other classroom buildings, making it nearly impossible for the minority of non-striking students to attend classes.

As if Molotov cocktail making had been part of the curriculum, overnight incendiary devices became standard warfare and not just amongst a few hard core radicals. Teams of students, most unknown to each other, gathered with shades drawn and lights low, pouring gasoline through siphons into bottles. A heavy metal bolt was inserted to help break the glass and a tampon or thin rag jammed into the neck as a wick. 

Late at night, affinity squads, hidden by darkness, stashed boxes of firebombs strategically located behind buildings and in alleys behind garbage cans. Teams of three were later assigned to deploy the firebombs - one to scout, one to light the tampon, and one to throw the bottle at the appointed target. Targets were strategically chosen to avoid harm to people, to spare small businesses, but to light up government buildings, military recruiting centers and offices of large corporations and big banks.  

Every night reports read - three fires set at New Chemistry and Communications Arts, both under construction. Firemen arriving on the scene were prevented from extinguishing the blazes as students twisted the hoses into knots blocking the flow of water. Guardsmen moved in and, after a skirmish surrounded the area, freeing up firemen to use hoses.

The Education Studies annex on Brooke Street was firebombed, resulting in what University police told the Cardinal was a “bad fire”. University police, in a sweep of campus buildings, uncovered stashed firebombs in the Humanities and Commerce Buildings. ROTC offices and military recruiting offices were hit with frequency, repeatedly requiring firefighters to extinguish the blazes. One night alone, dozens of fires exploded at random locations in what must have been a well-coordinated attack. In continued escalation, violence and frequent fires broke out nightly across campus and the city. 242 faculty members stopped teaching to support the strike, as well as most teaching assistants.

Thursday night marked a serious escalation by police, most particularly in the Mifflin/Basset area. According to the Cardinal, “Thursday, police gassed the area thoroughly several times and moved into houses in which forms were seen, searching for rock throwers and barricade builders.” Police no longer observed fundamental rights of search and seizure, but acted out their aggression with total disregard for legal procedures, such as securing search warrants to enter a dwelling. In their minds, they were bringing the war to us as with the invasion of Cambodia. 

Many wondered just how different were the streets of Madison from the jungles of Vietnam? In both locales, armed agents of the U.S. government acted with impunity and wanton disregard of law and decency. In the Mai Lai massacre, between 347-504 were killed by U.S. soldiers who made no distinction between insurgents and the general population. In Madison, those students who had hoped to remain was uninvolved bystanders were left with no choice but to choose a side as cops barged through their doors, randomly inundating their apartments with gas, justified because they claimed to have seen a “form” through the window.

Friday night, after five days of a general student strike, President Nixon convened a press conference in a vain attempt to stem the violent nationwide opposition to the Cambodia invasion. When queried by a reporter about the wisdom of his recent escalation, he responded that he had gone into “Cambodian sanctuaries that were fully occupied by the enemy” and that what he stood for was “what they [the protesting students] also want.” Rather than calm the waters, his presence on T.V. and his doubling down on the invasion sparked a furious reaction, with the number of colleges and high schools being struck reaching well over 500.

After Nixon’s address, about a thousand gathered on the Terrace, while another rally of dorm students assembled for a second night at the SE dorm area. At the Union Terrace rally, the assembled group made the decision to break into small bands of demonstrators that roamed the streets and alleys bombarding police cars with rocks and firebombs, setting up burning barricades, and tipping over streetlights.

New fronts sprung up like mushrooms with barricades being erected in the far off Lakeshore Halls area, which housed many of the engineering and agricultural students. Langdon Street, long the province of fraternity row, similarly turned into a war zone. Fraternity houses, previously the scene of Greek toga parties, became a refuge for frat boys fleeing police pursuit. 

An Ad Hoc Committee of Fraternities (members of the UF) issued a statement, “While we leave the question of violence or nonviolence to the individual, we are in complete support of the strike sponsored by the United Front. We pledge to organize our respective fraternities and sororities to demonstrate solidarity with our fellow students against American imperialism and racism.” Even those on fraternity row had come to see the War as part and parcel of U.S. imperialism, with racism being inextricably linked to the economic system.

Many took to sporting goggles to protect their eyes, soaking bandannas and rags to cover mouths and noses. Some of the more intrepid, blackened their faces, constructed homemade mortars with pipe, cherry bombs, and size D flashlight batteries, going up against the Guard, giving as good as they got.

A roaming band of around one hundred of us came upon the parked trailer of an 18-wheeler a few blocks from the Mifflin Coop. The cab was nowhere in sight. A yell went up, “Push it into the street for a barricade!” Dozens, shoulder to shoulder, tried to push the trailer from its curbside parking space into the street. At first it wouldn’t budge; more and more students jumped into the street to contribute to the effort. “One, two, three – push!” Again, “one, two three – push!” There was not enough room for everyone to have a hold on the trailer so people from behind pushed on the backs of those of us in front. Slowly, very slowly, the behemoth began to slide – inch by inch. The huge rubber tires remained locked, but by the sheer strength of numbers, we slid the trailer into the middle of the street.

Overhead, a Guard helicopter hovered, it’s block light turning night into day. The helicopter must have communicated tactical information to a command center as squad cars with lights flashing rushed to the scene. In the blink of an eye, dozens of cops began lobbing gas canisters over the trailer, landing all around us. Our bandannas soaked in baking soda and egg white were no match for the endless barrages of CS gas raining down. Wherever we could find rocks or other projectiles, we did our best to hold our ground, but were soon forced to retreat into alleys and friendly apartments whose front doors were opened to invite refuge.

Police broke ranks and moved through alleys searching for small bands of protestors, who minutes before had been throwing rocks and stones from behind the truck trailer. The police, encumbered by age, sweating profusely in the heat, and laden down with riot gear, fell far behind in their pursuit of us younger, more agile combatants. 

In a reflection of how broadly the United Front had permeated the rebellion, the Campus Crusade for Christ circulated a hand-printed mass flier entitled “Medical Info Bulletin”. The Bulletin outlined medical information and curative suggestions for: “Gas, Mace, Nausea Gas, Shock, Fractures and Bleeding. In a closing sentence of advice,“NEVER LEAVE AN INJURED PERSON …KEEP THEM CALM”. The Bulletin concluded, “Jesus Loves you … we do too. If we can help or you want to talk – call 257-9788.” When I saw the flier, I felt that all the nights of rapping in the dorms and educating fellow students had paid off. We were all in this together. 

Shortly before midnight, jeeps and truckloads of armed National Guard, faces covered with gas masks and heads protected by green helmets, converged on the Mifflin/Basset area from every direction. Again, they blanketed the darkened streets with clouds of CS gas. Streetlights and wires had been ripped from most poles by our motley crew of urban guerrillas, casting a deep shadow over the neighborhood. The lights from the Guard vehicles created an eerie haze as blinding beams shown through the gas and smoke. Meanwhile, Guard helicopters shining block lights steadily hovered over the area searching for trouble spots. The overhead sound of rotary blades created the distinct aura of a warzone.

Police converged on the neighborhood from four directions and targeted the Mifflin Coop where the black and white poster of Ho Chi Minh was now boarded over with plywood. A small army of police marched in formation down Mifflin Street (or was it an invasion route into Cambodia?). Upon reaching the Coop, they ripped off the plywood and forced CS gas cartridges into the store with grenade launchers, destroying the stocked shelves with CS particles that clung to food and packaging. Later, at least 13 gas canisters were found within the store and the apartment above.

Other officers moved block-by-block, clearing the streets of any human activity. The Madison Capitol Times reported that the police were shooting tear gas into every floor of every house creating “grapefruit sized” holes in both the first and second floor windows at 511, 514, 515, 525, 527, and 531 W. Mifflin (My very same block.). The house at 519 caught fire when a gas canister landed on an old couch.

Forced back into my apartment, I walked up the decrepit wooden stairs, unintentionally stirring up particles of CS gas that blanketed the floor, clung to my clothes, and unrelentingly burned my skin and eyes. Jumping into a cold shower afforded small relief; the particulates clinging to my body made me feel like I was being sandpapered all over, including my eyeballs and under my eyelids. The apartment remained inundated with miniscule particles of CS gas floating through the air and clinging to the floors and furniture. Exhausted, I climbed into bed waiting for sleep to transport me from the zone of discomfort.

Sometime around 3a.m., the repeated shrill ring of the phone pierced my uneasy sleep. Struggling to find my bearings, I made it to the wall phone in the kitchen, again stirring up the damn CS particulits with each step. A mechanical voice repeated a pre-recorded message; “You have a collect call from County jail. Press #1 to accept the charges.”

I pressed #1, and waited. “Bro - can you do me a huge favor?” I recognized the voice of my friend who worked at the Coop, the same friend who had lent me his car to pick up the Panthers. 

“What is it? Are you OK?”

“I’m cool, but I left some of those things with my fingerprints on them. They are in that place behind my house around the side of the garage. Man, so sorry but I really need you to wipe them. Do you understand me? Will you promise to help?” 

My heart beat rapidly as I digested the enormity, and danger, of the ask. He had been busted and had reached out with a plea for help. I understood from the cryptic conversation that in the alley behind his house on the 400 block of Mifflin, he must have stashed firebombs with incriminating fingerprints.

Still half asleep, I murmured to myself, “Man, I don’t want to go back out there! There are still pissed off fucking cops and Guards on the streets. Worse - helicopters with block lights are still circling, lighting up the streets and alleys as if the block is bathed in daylight. SHIT!” I will be heading out into a war zone at 3 in the morning – BY MYSELF! 

I desperately wanted to get back into bed, pull up the sheets and reenter the world of peaceful slumber; our code of comradeship obligated me to come to my buddy’s aid – consequence be damned. “Shit – here I go.”

I put on the darkest clothes – a black turtleneck, despite the heat, and black jeans. I added a black wool beanie that I pulled down low. I grabbed a moist rag and soaped it up, hoping that I would soon find the hidden contraband and rub off the fingerprints. I assumed soap and water would suffice as an eraser.

I looked out my front window. The intersection was strewn with smoldering trash. The streets sparkled with broken glass. I opened the window a crack, which had been closed to keep out the gas; smoke from the fires clouded the night air, combining with the gas still floating freely. Rocks lay strewn everywhere. I looked out over an apocalyptic scene that included a number of overturned cars, left over from barricades we had built hours earlier. I couldn’t see any police or Guards, but felt their ominous presence lurking in the dark.

It was time to head out – no more stalling. As I stepped out my apartment door, clouds of CS particles, stirred up by my feet, floated into the air, stinging my exposed face and hands. I held my breath, grabbed the handrail with my eyes closed, and rapidly descended to the first floor without taking in much gas. 

I cracked the front door and peered out on a surreal, dystopian scene. Even though my friend’s garage was no more than a city block away, I had to be stealthful so as not to be spotted by any lingering police or Guardsmen. I darted down the driveway, hugging the side of my house and made it to the alley, crouching low to scout the area. Overhead, I could hear the steady turning of helicopter blades, but not directly overhead, allowing me to hide in the shadows.

I crouched, and half crawled, to where my back alley and Basset Street intersected. I peaked around another garage. To my despair, I spotted a pair of riot cops, helmets pushed up while they puffed on cigarettes. As stealth fully and unobtrusively as possible, I made it down Basset Street. I held my breath till I found a crossing far enough away that the two cops wouldn’t spot me. 

The night was hot, the air acrid with smoke and lingering gas; I pushed myself to sneak down the alley toward my friend’s garage. I made steady progress until a helicopter overhead lit up the whole area and forced me to dive behind a cluster of garbage cans. For what seemed like hours, I hugged the ground, breathing as quietly as possible, not moving a muscle. Frankly, I can now admit – I was scared shitless. Who knew what would be the consequence of getting caught at 3a.m. sneaking down an alley all by myself - no affinity group to come to my rescue. 

After the helicopter passed, I made it to the area where I hoped to find the hidden firebombs. Next to the garage, stashed behind a dented metal trash can, I spotted two soda bottles with tampon wicks protruding from the necks. Breathing heavily, my hands nervously shaking, I pulled out my wet soapy rag and rushed to rub down the bottles.

Within seconds, I had completed my mission. Breathing a sigh of relief, I reversed course and headed down the alley toward the 500 block. It took less time to return, or maybe it just seemed so as I had accomplished my mission and felt relieved that I had covered up any evidence that could link my buddy to the “crime”.

I finally reached my front porch, looked around from a low crouch and darted up the stairs, again stirring up hundreds, maybe thousands, of CS particles. I made sure to observe the advice of the Campus Crusade for Christ – “GAS: DO NOT RUB EYES … TEAR GAS is a powder and rubbing gets it into your eyes. Irrigate eyes … [with] plain water.” I irrigated my eyes in the kitchen sink and jumped into a cold shower to wash off particles that had permeated my clothing. Exhausted, I lay back down knowing that the same routine would unfold early the next morning, and the next, and probably the next. The War Had Come Home - FOR REAL!

During the first week of the strike in Madison, the number of University buildings firebombed exceeded 27, with an additional 40 firebombed in the city in a single night. The National Guard, traveling in a caravan of 25-machine gun equipped jeeps, had positioned a machine gun nest in front of the Army Math building, strategically positioning sharpshooters on neighboring buildings. For the first time in years, Army Math was safe from our rage, but it had required the National Guard. 

As week two of the strike unfolded, Chancellor Young declared a “Week of Concern and Involvement”, setting aside Monday and Tuesday for student/faculty meetings to discuss “concerns that currently press upon the campus.” Young suggested that the remaining three days should involve the Governor, Wisconsin Senators, and Congressmen in “special programs on campus.” Lastly, he proposed a campus poll so “each member of our community [might] express his individual views on the current international crisis.” Where the fuck had he been for the past week? If he didn’t already know our ‘views’ he was blind, deaf and dumb!

The response came back at the Chancellor fast and furious. Faculty members, TA’s and students in the Philosophy and Comp Lit Departments demanded that Young withdraw all National Guard troops and non-University police from campus and suspend operations of the University for the duration of the week. The English Department faculty called for a referendum to cease “humanitarian pursuits” for as long as military research and ROTC remained on campus. 

The meetings being held in the departments of sociology, economics, anthropology, industrial relations, chemistry, physics, history, psychology, music and engineering all balked at the Chancellor’s futile efforts to establish a false normalcy. Two departments, Zoology and Comparative Lit, voted to suspend classes for the week. Regardless of intense Administration pressure, virtually none of the faculty even considered trying to rewind the clock to the days before the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings. 

With regard to the general student population, the Chancellor’s belated “proposals” fell on decidedly deaf ears. At a 7:30 p.m. rally hastily convened on Sunday night on the Terrace, United Front strike leaders denounced Chancellor Young’s “Week of Concern and Involvement” as a cynical and thinly veiled ploy to “co-opt the strike and obscure the real issues.” 

The prevailing mood remained defiant, both in Madison, and from coast to coast. From the Terrace, we moved up Bascom Hill in a violent half hour of trashing classroom buildings, cut short by driving rain. An intrepid few defied the downpour and moved on to confront police guarding Army ROTC T-16, as if to send an unequivocal, final rejection notice to the Chancellor.

At 8p.m. on Monday, 2000 protestors gathered on the Terrace. After 20 minutes, driving rain forced us inside to the Great Hall, which we commandeered without resistance. Future tactics dominated the open discussion. A speaker from Mother Jones pushed for continued outreach and political education and urged the crowd, “We could move out tonight, but it would be meaningless. We’ve got to move back into the dorms to pull people out to the rally tomorrow so that we can shut the University down Tuesday morning.” 

By an almost unanimous vote, attendees decided to move out, dispersing designated teams to dorms and neighborhoods – the SSO, LHA, Gilman, Langdon and Mifflin Street areas. Despite a week of striking, those of us in Mother Jones still considered it our primary mission to politically win over undecided students and continue to increase the numbers of those boycotting classes.

The demeanor of the police during Tuesday’s strike activities took a markedly more aggressive turn. A police casualty list of fifty officers from the prior week unleashed a distinctly more bellicose posture. Riot police uniformly donned red Wisconsin baseball caps, as if to advertise – “we’re here and we’re proud”. In the words of the Cardinal, “Police let it be known that intimidation was the word of the day.” (The red ball caps were eerily prescient of the red MAGA caps donned by Trumpers fifty years later.)

Strikers with particularly long hair became special targets of derision and physical harassment. Per the Cardinal, “One grizzly overweight officer pulled a chanting student from a non-obstructive picket line and growled, ‘I’ll remember your face’. The first chance I get I’ll knock your teeth out’.” Police cars pointedly flew American flags from their antennas. Signs on squad car windshields read, “Off The Pig”. A squad car with no plates, being driven by an officer with no identifying badge, leaned out his vehicle window shouting threats of retaliation “soon to come”.

Despite our determined organizing efforts of the night before, Tuesday’s rally drew only about 500 students, a far cry from the thousands that had stormed the campus on previous days. While some of the more militant activists again resurrected impenetrable picket lines, others engaged in less obtrusive picketing, still resulting in eleven arrests primarily for failure to possess a University ID. University police reported that five to ten Molotov cocktails had been discovered in Humanities, Commerce, and Bascom Hall.

The solid unity of the prior week slowly dissipated, as energy drained from the strike. While picketing continued throughout the week, the number of active strikers diminished, while many others just stayed home, waiting out the end of the semester. 

While remaining active on campus throughout the strike, I had also joined one of the non-student United Front organizations, the Community and Labor Relations Committee, in reaching out to local factories and the working class community.  Pauline Lipman of the Committee, explained in the Cardinal that since the strike began on May 5th, “daily leafleting has been going on in 16-17 Madison working places”, including the large Oscar Meyer plant, Gisholt machine shop, battery maker Ray-O-Vac, and the city’s main hospitals. The Labor Committee had also spent the week going door-to-door soliciting residents to sign petitions against the war.

In conversations with workers on their way into factories, I found almost overwhelming opposition to the war. As students with a reputation for militancy, we put some workers off by our appearance and our radical actions on campus, but the war had become so unpopular, many eagerly welcomed our fliers and embraced our anti-war stance.  

Management mobilized on the shop floor to isolate us as outsiders and troublemakers. At Ray-O-Vac, management threatened workers that if they signed our peace petition they would be discharged. While some workers backed off for fear of reprisals, anti-war sentiment remained; it was their sons who were being sent to the jungles as cannon fodder to do the fighting and dying.

The United Front’s 2nd Demand, regarding the $30,000 ransom for the Milwaukee 3, met with some push-back, fueled by management that inflamed bigoted sentiments and exploited exisisting racial divisions. As Lipman opined in the Cardinal, “We aren’t trying to cover up the Panther demand. It’s absolutely essential that we talk about it. There is a good deal of difficulty about getting through all the media myths about the Panthers.”  

As the United Front leaflet asserted, the fact that “‘Blacks’ and ‘Whites’ fear each other is not without justification, but working people – must recognize how valuable the separation of workers is to bosses and big business in this country. By maintaining the competition for wages and jobs working people forget that they are a class of people with common needs and a common enemy.” Although a bit pedantic sounding, the UF understood the importance of spreading anti-war sentiment among workers, even if only from fliers handed out at plant gates. 

Workers’ reception at the large Oscar Myer plant to the UF Labor Committee’s fliers had, at least initially, been particularly open and welcoming. One of the supportive shop stewards encouraged us to hold a rally at the plant gate. Our next flier announced a noon rally on Friday May 15.

Plant management launched a scare campaign and threatened workers with losing their jobs if they joined the rally. Crazy rumors, inflamed by management, circulated that thousands of violent students planned to descend on the factory to “burn it down”; crazy shit, but intimidating enough that the Labor Committee reluctantly canceled the rally and asked students not to congregate at the plant. Regardless, I drove to the plant at noon with my friend Don Perkins who had been scheduled to speak as he had been working at the Gisholt Machine shop. Sadly, we sat in our car and watched as fears of a student invasion dashed plans for a rally.

Finally, the semester ended. Many had missed more class time than we had spent in classrooms. The faculty pressured the Administration and final exams were cancelled in most courses. On Monday May 17, the College of Letters and Science faculty voted to relax rules governing pass-fall grading in the “wake of class interruptions, including the recent student strike [over Cambodia and Kent State] and the strike by the Teaching Assistant Association.” In other classes, students were given the option of taking a grade based on midterm scores. 

During the academic year there had been over 9000 protests across the country, including 84 major acts of arson and bombings. During the first week in May, 30 ROTC buildings across the country were burned or bombed; National Guard units were mobilized on 21 campuses in 16 states. Approximately four million students and 350,000 faculty took part in the May strike. Henry Kissinger was quoted as saying, “The very fabric of government was falling apart.” 

Intro To BARU - “Someone Took Out Army Math”

With the fabric of government falling apart, it seemed timely to look outside of Madison to learn from the experiences of other more developed political organizations. My then girlfriend Anne and I decided to head to Oakland to stay with her brother and sister-in-law, while we immersed ourselves in political organizing led by the nascent Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU). 

I welcomed the opportunity to observe BARU. At the time, BARU had become a leading force amongst a new constellation of local, area-based collectives striving to organize workers on the job and in their communities, arising from the same political strain as MJRL, but further developed. For me, this was “taking it to a higher level” and I hoped to learn lessons I could bring back to Madison.

BARU was positioning itself to lead a new Marxist-Leninist wave nationally. BARU studied Mao’s writings and was oriented to workers’ revolution. Having been born in the Bay Area, the BARU was inspired by the Black Panthers, and often allied with the Panther’s political leadership . The organization still considered itself  “pre-party” - that is, it aspired to lead but was still learning what that involved, in what activists were calling “the workers’ movement.” 

Anne and I moved in with a young BARU couple and their two young children. We shared a small back bedroom in an Oakland row house. BARU had captured the imagination of those of us in Madison and around the country who were searching for a disciplined organization dedicated to building a revolutionary movement amongst the working class and poor people. It was a politically romantic time, full of new experiences and much to learn. Anne found work in a local factory and I participated in organizing projects in which BARU members were involved. 

I traveled frequently to working class Richmond, just north of Oakland, to assist BARU members publishing the debut issue of People Get Ready, a monthly newspaper aimed at the working class community - the first of its kind.  (I later employed lessons of People Get Ready to help launch a similar paper in Madison’s working class community, We The People.)  

RU activists I met impressed me. The staff of People Get Ready consisted of some former students now working in industry, young factory workers and community members who had come together to create a monthly paper that spoke directly to conditions in local factories and the struggles being waged by unions and militant workers in the Richmond area. 

People Get Ready propounded a strong voice supporting local struggles against discrimination and police attacks on peoples of color. I still remember the front page of the first issue with a large 36-font title “Whirly Pigs Out of the Community.” The title introduced an article critiquing the deployment of a police helicopter to surveil, at intimidatingly low altitudes, Richmond neighborhoods populated primarily by blacks and Latinos. 

RU members working on the paper appeared genuine and sincere and blended well with local activists who had joined in the launch of Richmond’s first community paper. We all shared in the excitement of producing a new vehicle for organizing the new worker’s movement. 

It was an exciting and heady few months in northern California, with a litany of high-profile political events. On August 7, 17-year old Jonathan Jackson held a Superior Court judge at gunpoint in a San Rafael courthouse. He hoped to negotiate freedom for political prisoners known as the Soledad Brothers, including his older brother George. On the spot, Jonathan died in a hail of police bullets, along with the judge and two other escaped inmates.  

Along with RU members, I joined thousands, distinguished by all-inclusive ethnic diversity, in front of the Oakland Panther Headquarters in a solemn, somber tribute to Jonathan Jackson. Our ranks jammed the streets in a massive show of unity in support of the Black Panther Party and its revolutionary mission. As testimony to the gravity of the event, not a single law enforcement officer appeared on neighborhood streets. 

I also participated in the Los Siete De La Raza Defense Committee, composed of a rainbow of political and community activists based in the Latino community. Seven young Latinos in San Francisco’s Mission District had been ensnared in a police altercation resulting in the death of an officer. The Panthers and others built support, through education and marches through San Francisco’s streets.

While I can no longer remember the route of the march, I recall proceeding from the Mission through working class districts and with the collaboration of the Panthers, through what was then San Francisco’s black neighborhood. In response to on-going, massive community support, all seven were eventually acquitted in a rare legal victory. In my youthful naivete, it felt like the power of  our unity would soon lay the groundwork for a movement that would build a new world from the shattered remnants of Kissinger’s nightmare. 

I also participated in a weekly Marxist study group with young BARU cadre, none more than a year or two older than me. The theory, we hoped, would guide our still politically immature movement to successfully fight for liberation and an end to the capitalist system. Basically, we wanted to better understand where we wanted to go and how we hoped to get there. The underlying principle was, those who know - teach/those who don’t know - learn. While the political level of our discussion was pretty elementary, we proudly followed a long tradition of learning to apply scientific socialism to conditions in the U.S.  

Grandiose goals, but at the time we, and thousands of others in the U.S. and around the world, believed that by devoting our lives to the cause, by fighting the good fight, by fearing no sacrifice, our movement  could, and would, change the world for the betterment of humanity by abolishing the inequities that are part-and-parcel of capitalism and its perpetual downward crises. 

The short summer wound down and we readied to return. I had learned a lot, and gained valuable experience I planned to take back and share with my comrades in Madison. We had a bit more time of uninterrupted California sunshine before saying goodbye. We had no idea the summer was about to end with a bang - a very big bang. 

*****     *****

In the early morning of August 27, I lay in a deep sleep. No sound invaded my slumber until I felt a vigorous shaking as if I lay atop a California fault line that had just shifted. Startled, I struggled to open my eyes, the morning’s first light had just begun to bleed through the open windows. 

“Jon – you have a call; it sounds URGENT! Get up - you need to answer the phone.” 

Who on earth calls in the middle of the fucking night,” I wondered, as I forced open my eyes, trying to focus on the voice. 

I stumbled to the phone in the front room. Despite no introduction, I recognized the voice, which conveyed a sharp edge of apprehension and dire warning. “Melrod – you need to get back right away.”

“How come?” I muttered, still half asleep. “Classes don’t begin for weeks.”

“Hear those sirens? Someone took out Army Math. Shit’s going down big time. You need to get back!” The urgency in the caller’s voice dispelled any lingering hope that I could go back to bed. Before the call ended, I heard an eerie cacophony of sirens in the background – police, fire, EMT - sounding like an air raid in a movie depicting London during the blitzkrieg bombings of WWII.  

“Wow! Someone finally did it! It had only been a matter of time.” The words - “took out Army Math” - came as no surprise, as if a ticking time bomb had inevitably struck the deadly hour. For a year, we had been frustrated and unsuccessful in forcing the university to sever ties with the military. It came as no shock that someone had taken matters into their own hands with an explosion loud enough to awaken me in Oakland. 

At precisely 3:42am, a powerful explosion rocked the campus; like Zeus hurling lightning bolts from on high the massive detonation could be felt and heard for miles. Windows shattered and buildings shook as 2000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, crammed into the back of a stolen Ford van, exploded within feet of the infamous Army Math Research Center. The force of the explosion scattered pieces of the van atop an eight-story building three blocks away, with 26 nearby buildings damaged. 

Tragically, the bombing resulted in the death of a researcher Robert Fassnacht, injured three others, and caused significant destruction to the physics department. The four young bombers – Leo Burt, David Fine, and two Armstrong brothers – known as the “New Year’s Gang”, had meticulously observed the building in advance of the tragic night, but, as fate would have it, Robert Fassnacht happened to work late. 

Immediately after the bombing, the Daily Cardinal published two editorials supporting the bombers in the context of the University’s intransigence to moving military research off campus, or sever ties with the military. Many in the broader community, however, reacted with horror. Cardinal advertisers initiated a boycott; within a few weeks 75% of the paper’s news pages were no more. 

To understand why we weren’t surprised, and in fact fully anticipated such an apparently reckless and indefensible act, one must comprehend the all-pervasive extent to which the horrors of the Vietnam War touched the daily lives of virtually every young person in America in the 1960’s. 

In 1968, Nixon had campaigned on a pledge to end the war, but once elected had escalated the fighting with massive secret bombing campaigns. Under the Nixon administration the U.S. dropped more bombs on Southeast Asia than it did during the entirety of WWII. By the end of 1970, deaths of American soldiers climbed to over 53,000, with thousands more returning physically maimed, disabled, and psychologically scarred for life.  

The entire world’s moral conscience had been shaken in late 1969 when news of the My Lai massacre surfaced, confirming what many already suspected transpired on an all-too-routine military operation. My Lai exposed, in graphic, gory, horrifying detail, the mass indiscriminate killing of between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians on March 16, 1968. Victims included old men and women, children and infants, with some of the women being systematically gang-raped and their bodies mutilated beyond recognition. Word of the My Lai massacre brought many of us to tears, both in mourning for those who had been massacred, as well as our frustrating inability to alter the course of the war despite years of massive opposition and overwhelming public condemnation of the continuing debacle. 

“How could My Lai happen? How could human beings commit such atrocities? Why wouldn’t the government listen to our protests and pleas to stop the senseless killing?” We asked each other constantly. Yet -- the war relentlessly cranked on, unabated day by day, collectively summoning our deepest moral being to somehow stop the slaughter. Whenever I fell into the moral quandary of how much more I could do to oppose the war, I reminded myself of student leader Mario Savio’s eloquent and moving words during the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,

makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part.

And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the 

wheels, upon the lever, upon all the apparatus –

and you’ve got to make it stop! 

Savio was harkening to King’s ethos of nonviolent civil disobedience. But the same sentiment “to just make it stop” triggered the AMRC bombing. 

Describing the period, Madison Mayor William Dyke was quoted as saying that the years leading up to the summer of 1970 had been marked by “nine months of guerilla war” on campus and on city streets. In Witness to the Revolution (2016), one of Madison’s top law enforcement officers, Tom McCarthy, described the war footing of the authorities: “We’re going to bring the war to Mifflin Street … So we went down there [to the Mifflin/Basset community] and bombed [with tear gas explosives] the shit out of them. We took their bicycles and threw them in a pile, and burned them. You name it. The protestors hated me and I hated them.”

While not quite the battle-scared, napalm disfigured jungles of Vietnam, the Mayor was not far off the mark. Our teach-ins and demonstrations, both on and off campus, were often accompanied by pitched battles with campus and city police, who routinely blanketed protests with clouds of tear gas and noxious pepper spray which burned the eyes, stuck to the skin, clinging for hours as an irritant. Even washing off the pepper spray triggered intense stinging and burning. 

There were nighttime fire bombings of anything military-related on campus or in town. So for the few years leading up to the summer of 1970, the National Guard logged more time patrolling the Madison campus than any other college in America. Madison became known as the most violent campus in the country. Seeing camouflage green armored vehicles with mounted machine guns rolling over city streets and on campus engendered the feeling that, just like the Vietnamese, we were fighting for our liberation and against the military machine.  

Rumors were swirling that the FBI had compiled the names of activists and organizers via their network of informants who had infiltrated our ranks. The Mifflin/Basset community waited apprehensively for the Feds’ hammer to drop. An eerie, foreboding quiet permeated the neighborhood like the soundless gathering of dark storm clouds.  

The community telegraph repeatedly circulated, and recirculated, the warning that the Feds were in town with an army of agents, over one hundred, intending to link anyone they could to the bombing and use the incident to repress the above ground, legal anti-war movement by spreading fear and paranoia while conducting a political witch hunt.  

On Saturday morning, as I lay in bed, I suddenly heard the sounds of a major commotion outside my apartment. In the oppressive summer heat, my front window overlooking Mifflin street was wide open to allow in any slight breeze that might relieve the end-of-summer Wisconsin heat, and humidity so thick one could cut it with a knife. I jumped up, running to the front window. Zero hour had inevitably arrived – gathered on the corner of Mifflin/Basset near the Co-op were dozens and dozens of Feds distinguishable by their almost identical uniforms of mirror sunglasses, buzz cuts and cop shoes. Standing opposite was a steadily growing and boisterous crowd, heckling and chanting for the FBI to get out of “our neighborhood.” 

I knew the Feds would soon be banging on my front door. I steeled myself, reviewing in my mind what I intended to do and say if, and when, they came pounding. Fearing how aggressive and violent the Feds might be after such a high profile bombing, I carefully placed my Mossberg 12 gauge pump shotgun by my door propped against the wall – assuring myself I would never use it unless my life absolutely depended on it. Minutes felt like hours as I patiently waited, hoping I wouldn’t hear a knock, but pretty sure I soon would. 

At the time, I didn’t know for sure that I had already appeared on the Bureau’s radar. It wasn’t until years later, when, in response to repeated Freedom of Information Act Requests, I came into possession of my 900+ page surveillance file. In a Memorandum, dated 6/10/71, the dossier reveals that my telephone calls to and from the Chicago Office of the Black Panther Party had been monitored as early as July 1970.

SUBJECT:     JONATHAN MELROD

By relet, Chicago [FBI] advised the below listed individual [Jonathan Melrod] was called from either telephone number [numbers redacted] all of which numbers are connected with the

Chicago BPP Chapter. Those calls were made during the Period July, 1970 to February 1971.

                                                   JONATHAN MELROD

                                                   506 West Mifflin

                                                   Madison, Wisconsin 

                                                   608-257-9889

MILWAUKEE

AT Madison, Wis.

Conduct background investigation to identify subject, and contact logical sources to determine subject’s BPP or other extremist associations.”  

I had fallen under Hoover’s watchful eye. As I waited that Saturday morning for the inevitable knocking on the door I felt a deep foreboding in my gut, the only sound being my breathing. After the cold-blooded murder of Fred Hampton, each of us knew that the government was fully capable of eliminating anyone they considered dangerous or threatening to the established order. With that in mind, I glanced again at my shotgun, again repeating my solemn mantra to not use it unless my life faced imminent endangerment. I can safely say that when I had become a Bar Mitzvah boy just seven years before in Washington, D.C., I never contemplated being in such a precarious position. 

Suddenly, I heard footsteps as the wooden stairs to my third floor walk-up creaked under the feet of at least two people. I held my breath trying to hear any snippets of conversation. As the sound of steps grew louder, I steeled myself consciously tamping down the fear that had welled up in me. I steadied my breathing, again trying to maintain a modicum of calm. 

A sharp banging on the door focused my attention. I silently waited thinking – “Maybe they will leave if I remain quiet and they think I’m not home.” 

More banging – now harder, as if sending the message – “We know you’re in there and we don’t plan on leaving.” I remained silent, stalling for time that slowly ticked second by second.

An authoritative, gruff voice - “Jonathan Melrod – we are agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’d like you to open the door so we can have a brief talk with you – nothing serious, just a brief conversation.” 

“We have nothing to talk about,” I calmly responded in a determined voice that, I hoped, betrayed no hint of fear. 

“We think we do. Just let us in and we’ll be brief – just a few quick questions.” 

“I know you’re here about Army Math and I have nothing to say. We have nothing to talk about – absolutely NOTHING!”

Again banging – this time conveying a greater sense of urgency. “We’d like you to open the door now so we can speak with you. 

“Do you have a warrant to enter my apartment?”

“We don’t need a warrant to simply speak with you. Now stop messing around and let us in!”

I glanced at the shotgun leaning against the wall and took a deep breath, taking stock of what was going on and how I should respond.  

I picked up the Mossberg and pumped it hard – chambering a 12-gauge shell. The metallic sound rang out – the unmistakable, threatening sound that only a pump shotgun conveys. 

“I told you – we have NOTHING to talk about. If you don’t have a warrant, you have no right or authority to enter my apartment. If you come through that door – I fucking promise you’ll leave as hamburger meat.”

While I might have sounded tough, at least I tried to sound tough, my heart beat against my chest and beads of sweat pooled on my forehead as I held my breath waiting for their response. After what felt like an eternity, during which I contemplated all the bad things that might jump off at any moment, I heard steps descending the stairs, the sound of the old creaking wood under their feet never so welcome. I let out a deep sigh, glad that that was over, at least for now.

Many years later in reviewing my FBI file, I found a section that must have referred to that incident. The Special Agent (SA) who penned the Memorandum had written that agents had approached me and had found me to be extremely uncooperative and belligerent and that any further direct contact should be suspended. 

I am white. In other situations where that had not been a factor in an FBI inquiry into a deadly bombing, the consequences of such defiance might very well have ended drastically differently. Looking back, I readily admit my white skin acted as protective armour shielding me from greater and more deadly consequences. 

The bombing shook the Madison movement to its deepest roots. While the bombing might have been the expected consequences of the increasing militancy and frustration in not being able to end the war, the unfortunate death of the graduate student plunged the campus anti-war movement into confusion and semi-paralysis. 

>> Madison, Part 3