25 years ago Berkeley students waged battle for free speech, democratic rights

Scan page 6

Berkeley at War, by W.J. Rorabaugh. Oxford University Press, New York. 277 pages, $24.95.

This book, published in 1989, is very timely. Last year marks the 25th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) on the University of California campus at Berkeley. Plans to erect a memorial to this historic struggle on campus are arousing considerable controversy.

The FSM rallies, sit-ins, and confrontations set the tone for a decade of struggle that started with students and widened to involve the faculty, the anti-war movement, the New Left, the counterculture, and almost every element of protest in the country.

Into the vortex of struggle were drawn the university administration, the Board of Regents, faculty, the Berkeley police, the National Guard, and Governor Ronald Reagan.

W.J. Rorabaugh, who was in Berkeley part of this time, has traced the course of this turbulent movement in a lucid and scholarly fashion. His account ranges from such broad questions as the impact of rock music and the counterculture to details of battle tactics executed under clouds of tear gas.

"Inheritance of a sterile world"

Many have wondered why such a student revolt erupted at a time when it was easier to go to college and when most graduates had good job prospects. Rorabaugh says that the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam war provide only partial answers. He points out that the student uprising was a global phenonemon, with young people from Paris to Tokyo marching and demonstrating.

He points to a common denominator underlying every issue. He writes, "What students in all these countries faced ... was a world created and then frozen into place in 1945.... For students born just before, during, or after the war, the projection of 20 years of stasis indefinitely into the future promised the inheritance of a sterile world without any chance to alter it."

In the 1950s, the university administration made sure that students did not become movers or makers of a new world. Communists were barred from campus, tables with political literature were banned, and only a gray conformity was permitted.

A loyalty oath, imposed on students and faculty, weeded out radicals, while Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) intimidated dissenters on and off campus. A visit by the committee usually led to lost jobs and ruined careers.

When HUAC visited San Francisco on May 13, 1960, citizens saw something new: hundreds of students being washed down the city hall steps by fire hoses-into the arms of waiting police. They had come to protest the subpoena of a Berkeley student by HUAC inquisitors.

The fire hoses soaked the protesters but enflamed the University of California campus. The next day, 5000 students and others besieged the HUAC hearing room. It was the beginning of a new social force on the American scene.

"Operation table"

Back on the campus, several years of lowkey struggle between administration and students ensued. Tables with left-wing literature, barred from the campus, were set up just outside. In September 1964, the administration, claiming jurisdiction, banned these tables also.

A number of students had spent the summer on Freedom Rides in the South. After fighting for civil rights in Mississippi, they were not prepared to lose them in Berkeley. They moved their tables to the campus's forbidden zone-Sproul Plaza.

The university responded by suspending eight students. Hundreds more young people came forward to keep the tables in place in front of Sproul Hall, the administration building.

On Oct. 1, 1964, university police drove into the plaza and arrested Jack Weinberg, a SOCIALIST ACTION student leader of "operation table." He was put in the patrol car, but the car could not go anywhere. It was surrounded by hundreds of students, who were sitting down. For 32 hours the deadlock continued, with Weinberg in the car and students on the roof addressing the crowd.

A new student leadership emerged from this confrontation. Most came from radical families. Many of their parents had been victimized by the witch hunt. This made the students super-sensitive to any infringement of civil liberties.

However, most of these students thought their parents politics were irrelevant. They felt that the "Old Left" had failed, and had little to contribute. Their attitude was expressed by the aphorism coined by Jack Weinberg, "Never trust anyone over 30!"

"To make their own world"

Rorabaugh quotes Mario Savio, a student who clearly expressed the view of the New Left when he wrote in 1964: "Young people resent being handed a world delineated, finite, and limited; they expect to make their own world.... I am tired of reading history. Now I want to make it."

In Sproul Plaza, the students found they could make history simply by sitting on the ground. They created an impasse that could not be ignored. Clark Kerr, the liberal university president, wavered between the pressures of the students and the directives of the conservative Board of Regents. He negoti• MUSIC STRIKER for I THE Free Speecheer SOA BE FoR ated, compromised, and promised to ease restrictive rules.

Meanwhile, police were massed nearby, ready to clear the plaza by force. They were not needed as the students accepted the compromise as a victory and lifted the siege.

It was only a partial victory, however, as Clark Kerr reneged on a promised amnesty and red-baited the growing Free Speech Movement (FSM). It was time to raise the struggle to a higher level. First, the troops had to be prepared.

A simple demand, the MAY 1990 free speech, rallied the maximum number of students to the movement. They wanted an end to the regulation of political activity on campus.

Rorabaugh expresses admiration for the political savvy that FSM leaders had gained from the civil rights struggle in the South. He writes: "They knew when to advance, when to retreat, how to use crowds, how to use the media, how to intimidate, and how to negotiate. The activists understood their ultimate weapon, the sit-in, and were prepared to use it."

The ultimate gains from a sit-in were described by Rorabaugh: "First it would galvanize, mold, and radicalize student opinion.... Friends would join, then friends of friends, and the feeling of camaraderie experienced in the sit-in [would give] the movement what it needed most: bodies.

"Bringing police onto the campus would generate benefits.... Above all, the faculty would not tolerate the university run as a police state.... Thus a large sit-in would demonstrate widespread support for the FSM and push the faculty to açt."

"You've got to make it stop!"

Mass rallies, attracting as many as 5000 students, were held in Sproul Plaza almost daily. They sang civil rights songs, and original songs satirizing thought control on the campus.

A climax was reached on Dec. 2, when Mario Savio gave voice to the deep anger, the anxiety, the frustration of modern life and the sense of powerlessness that was the undercurrent of all the turmoil of the 1960s. Savio said: "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious ... that you have got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... and you've got to make it stop."

In this spirit 1000 students marched into Sproul Hall and occupied all four floors, prepared for a long stay. It was destined to be short. At 3 a.m., the students were ordered to vacate, and 376 police assembled to remove Students keep police from arresting student leader Jack Weinberg.

them. The students went limp and had to be carried out.

This operation took till 4 in the afternoon, making the police operation visible to everyone on campus. Over 770 were arrested and taken to a prison 25 miles away. As FSM predicted, faculty members were repelled by the police action. They organized car caravans to go to Santa Rita Jail and bail out the prisoners. A student-faculty alliance now isolated Clark Kerr.

Kerr was further isolated by a one-day student strike on Dec. 4. Half the students stayed away, many from classes cancelled by teaching assistants. These were graduate students who served as part time lecturers, but were not considered faculty members. Inspired by FSM, they pushed for union recognition and better conditions. Thus, the students won another important ally.

Victory was assured when the faculty senate voted 824 to 115 for FSM proposals for free speech and civil rights on campus. Clark Kerr said the Regents would never accept such liberal rules. The faculty bypassed Kerr and negotiated with the Regents themselves.

The Regents were tired of the struggle and anxious to settle. Similar rules had been adopted at nearby San Francisco State and other universities. They accepted the faculty proposals. The war was won.

More battles to be fought But there were many more battles yet to be fought. In subsequent chapters, Rorabaugh follows the course of the "Filthy Speech" campaign, the Peoples' Park battle, and the Berkeley students' role in the anti-Vietnam War struggle.

He does not limit his focus to the campus. He covers the rise of the Black Panther movement, the impact of the Beat Generation, the counter culture, and the alternative press.

However, his concentration on happenings in Berkeley alone might lead the reader to forget the student protests breaking out in other universities throughout the country. The FSM was a part of this national and international student protest. It was also a trend-setter, emulated on campuses from coast to coast.

While he reports on the activity of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance on the Berkeley campus, Rorabaugh assigns them a subsidiary role. Marxism was not the guiding ideology of the student protest, he observes.

Yet without a Marxist ideology, the student movement lacked the staying power and program to challenge the power structure. That's one reason why the FSM did not survive as an organization after its victory.

But the FSM was not without historic significance. Rorabaugh concludes: "The sixties, like a tidal wave that had crashed on a beach, dramatically changed Berkeley. Gone was the university's traditional power over its students.... Gone was the cruelty of racial segregation ... gone too was self-confident triumphant liberalism."

Twenty-five years later it appears that many of the battles of the 60s will have to be fought over again. Rorabaugh's book is a valuable critique of the generation of students and others who pulled us out of the despair and pessimism of the McCarthy era. •

Scan page 7

SOCIALIST ACTION SPECIAL FEATURE

----- pull-quotes -----

PRET : STUDENT, 9 STRIKE