The reader here will find some articles on the FSM I find to be of special interest. -BTS
Full FSM Press Bibliography with links12/09/1984, The Free Speech revolutionaries, 20 years later
.............................The courtroom courtship and other romances
12/10/1984, Two decades do not dim credos of the UC rebels
.............................Chronology of the Free Speech Movement
12/11/1984, Free Speech patrimony scatter to the winds
.............................FSM leaders keep the·faith: 'Still agitating' after all these years
.............................CALENDAR OF CHANGE A Selective Chronology
12/12/1984, 'Biggest convulsion in history of education'
.............................Some standout events in 3 tumultuous years
.............................Players and bystanders in the UC revolution
12/13/1984, Those who still look for ways to escape
.............................Some 'got it,' some got Rolfed, but most steered clear of religion
12/14/1984, Nuclear war fears unite former FSM activists
.............................How Berkeley has changed since the FSM
San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
December 9, 1984
The Free Speech revolutionaries, 20 years later
Agents of ChangeBy Lynn Ludlow
Examiner staff writer
First of six partsWhen the 1960s disappeared, so did Charlie Brown.
"The world didn't change fast enough for him," said mountaineer Bob Briggs. "He always lived on the edge."
Edge. The word comes up often in recollections of 1964, when the Free Speech Movement loosed an avalanche of political, social and cultural change.
"We were standing at the edge of the cliff," said Randall Collins, "and breaking away."
He didn't break away, not like Charlie Brown, but he doesn't throw his body onto the gears, either. He now writes books, teaches sociology and lives in a $300,000 home in San Diego.
Charlie Brown, Randall Collins and 781 other agents of change found themselves on the edge 20 years ago when the FSM occupied Sproul Hall, the administration building at the University of California in Berkeley.
For campus activists, it was the autumn of a tumultuous year. They went limp by the hundreds in San Francisco civil rights demonstrations. They escaped death during Mississippi voter drives. Non-violence, civil disobedience and pacifism were emphasized.
It was the year before opposition to the Vietnam War would alter the nature of protest, which intensified
Diego. Co in violence as the war itself escalated. And over the next five years, the protest movement would generate an unprecedented challenge to American institutions.And now 20 years have passed. What happened to Charlie? Randall? The other spear carriers?
A 20th anniversary survey by The Examiner suggests the rank-and-file demonstrators of the FSM have become—for the most part—individualists and serious overachievers.
Although the FSM veterans vary greatly, most of them conform to a profile that is professional, highly educated, politically disenchanted, liberal, non-religious, non-activist, married and, to a striking degree, independent.
Most are self-employed or self-supervised.
None of those questioned in survey is involved in sales, services, business administration, finance, industry, utilities or a life of crime.
With a range from zero to the level of extraordinary wealth, annual incomes recorded by the survey suggest an average of $34,000.
Many of the movement activists say they experimented with drugs and other diversions.
Most eventually settled down and bought homes. Some watch in dismay today as their own children choose their own forms of rebellion, such as computerland career plans or fashions that emphasize hair abuse.
Worse, few youngsters today show even a tepid interest in America's first major campus protest.
Yet many historians call the FSM sit-in the dawning of a new age of liberation. Or alienation.
Or both.
The Examiner spent three months gathering data from rank and-file demonstrators, a sample
plucked at random from the FSM arrest roster of Dec. 3, 1964.One drifter, Charlie Brown, address unknown. One author, Randall Collins, well established. Dozens of professors and professionals, entrepreneurs and artists, lawyers and
—See Page A14, col. 1
Agents of Change
On the trail of Charlie Brown and the FSM—From Page Al
homemakers. Cast forth, most of them, from Berkeley. Found in places of like ilk—like Elk, in Mendocino County, populated by refugees from the 1960s.
Collins, 43, refuses to look back with nostalgia.
"It was the age of conformism," he said. "The '50s were psychologically very oppressive. Just pick some group to conform to, and that's it. It was a vast mindlessness."
***
Charlie Brown. He's a clown.
That Charlie Brown. . .
From "Charlie Brown"
by the CoastersThe search for Charlie Brown began with a problem. It wasn't his name. He changed it from Charles Artman because, as he explained, he always wound up a loser.
He couldn't be traced through his profession. On campus he was an evangelist of psychedelia, listing his occupation as Boohoo of the Berkeley Bag.
He would have been the East Bay's first hippie, but in 1964 the term hadn't yet been coined.
"He was always trying to be the guru," said Brian Carey, an acquaintance. "He probably ended up in Skid Row somewhere."
***
About two-thirds of the FSM veterans were tracked down in two months of investigation.
Mark Desmet owns a computer company in Silicon Valley. Richard Adelman teaches people to play conga drums in his Oakland living room. Patricia Eliet teaches English at Cal State Dominguez Hills. John Reinsch, M.D., is a hematologist in Fresno.
Julie Wellings has just returned from 10 years of spiritual pilgrimage in India. Keith Simons lived on an Arkansas back·to-the-land commune. Rodney Mullen served Synanon, then left it.
In a representative sample of 58 drawn from the arrest list, only one works for the federal government (as a foreign service officer).
Only three are corporate minions. One is a copy editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. Another is the display manager of a Modesto store.
The other is probably the only Del Monte cannery foreman with a political science degree, but he needs a seasonal job. He spends the winter months with his family in Elk.
Collins prefers to work for himself.
"When I write, it's my own endeavor," he said. "If I waste time, I can only blame myself."
He is author of three books, including "The Credential Society," a critique of higher education's emphasis on degrees. Much graduate education, he asserts, is simply a way to guarantee work for employees of universities.
For a decade Collins has worked on a comparison of Oriental and Western philosophies. He said, "I was never very career·oriented."
***
... He's goin' to get caught,
Just you wait and see.
(Deep bass voice)
"Why is ever'body
Always pickin' on me?"
—From "Charlie Brown,"
by the CoastersAlthough he is far from typical of FSM demonstrators, the search for Charlie Brown was mandated by the rules for a proper statistical survey, which allows the selection of every 10th name on a list of subjects.
The problem was the 20 years between then and now. In a society that values privacy, some individuals can't be found without a court order.
And some can't be found at all. "As far as I know;' said Andrew Kent, who knew him 15 years ago in New York, "Charlie has disappeared ' from the face of the earth."
The irony is that barefooted Charlie Brown was so easy to find in 1964, when even the FSM rebels wore skull· cap haircuts and narrow ties. To them, he was something of an embarrassment. Maybe he still is.
He is remembered for passing around a peace pipe inside Sproul Hall. He often wore black robes, granny glasses and shoulder-length hair held by a head-band. He seldom wore shoes. He asked strangers to call him Little Eagle.
He proclaimed himself head priest of the Neo-American Temple of the Rainbow Path.
His views of peace and goodness were asserted with such vigor that he rarely won converts.
"Charlie was not the kind of person you would call a friend," said the Rev. Phil Zimmer, an Episcopal clergyman who knew him for a time in Wyoming. "He was ' always trumpeting a cause. People always had to send him down the road eventually."
***
''Employers will love this generation .... They are going to be easy to handle."
—Clark Kerr, UC president, 1959The times, as the song said, they were a-changin'. Marxists on campus spoke confidently of problems faced by "the post scarcity generation," a term that would later disappear. Galaxies, Imperials and Impalas threw their wide bodies across Telegraph Avenue. Suburban homes went for $499 down plus closing costs. Newspapers invariably called the Beatles "long-haired Liverpudlians."
Few questioned the notion of progress through engineering. Nobody protested when the Sierra Club pro. posed a nuclear plant as an alternative to new power dams on the Tuolumne : River. The Ban the ~mb movement ~ got as little campus support as the "fight against Proposition 14, a statewide referendum that overturned an open-housing law.
Newspapers took an indulgent view of panty raids, a diversion that migrated from the East Coast to Berkeley in 1956. Damages were about $20,000 in Berkeley's raid, but few noticed how such events often escalated from humor into near-riots against police and authority.
This was the first generation reared on television. Problems were seen, literally, in black and white and were solved in the final five minutes. Existentialism prevailed as the biggest philosophy on campus.
Collins said: "It expressed the meaningless of life but paradoxically showed that the only meaning comes from when you say, 'OK, I am responsible for what I do or don't do,' and meaning is something you create, not discover. You create it by sort of rebelling against convention."
***
Artman, Charles: #7547; appeal taken; 3 counts, stipulation; $250 or 25 days jail.The hunt for Charlie Brown, as with the other FSM veterans in The Examiner's survey, began with a paper trail of public records.
After 20 years, arrest reports and trial documents aren't available.
But still on file with the state Court of Appeal is a list of 783 people charged with trespass and resistmg arrest in Sproul Hall on the morning of Dec. 3, 1964.
Then came further checks in public records for Artman/Brown and all the FSM names in the survey:
UC records show all but a few of the demonstrators were students. Charlie is listed as an anthropology major who dropped out in 1962.
Most of the arrested students appear in the UC student directory for 1~ - but not Charlie. He Isn't listed as a registered voter in San Francisco or Alameda counties, and, unlike many in the survey, his name did not appear in phone directories for the Bay Area, Los Angeles or New York City nor in city directories for San Francisco or Oakland.
In all of them, Charlie is simply missing. And he does not hold a driver's license or own a motor vehicle in California, according to the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
However, the state Bureau of Vital Statistics in Sacramento holds a copy of a wedding certificate for Artman in 1966. He gave his occupation as "wandering priest."
The marriage was later annulled when his bride, a 19.year-old woman from affluent Kensington, com· plained about living in unfurnished cellars and the back of his truck. The situation deteriorated, she told the court, when her husband brought home two other young women one night for "illicit relations."
It's the kind of thing that could get someone in serious trouble, but his name didn't show up among the death certificates.
***
The demonstrators have used their soiled bodies, their foggy intellects only to tear down the reputation of this citadel of learning, which helped build the bomb, produce a dozen Nobel award winners. New Yorkers retched in disbelief to see on TV their bodies, a melange of beards and black socks, piled up like cattle across the corridors.
—Jim Scott, then sports editor, the late Berkeley GazetteThe force of public hostility surprised most FSM demonstrators. Some problems were immediate, others came up later.
"I flunked out," said David Tussman. He later went to a junior college, then returned and went on to law school.
Lynne Hollander said: "It made me more radical. It affected my choice of work for a long time, and my friendships."
Steve Robman was one of three in The Examiner sample to join the Peace Corps, which didn't hold his Berkeley arrest against him.
"It became," he said, "a badge of honor."
After he left the university in 1969 with his Ph.D., Collins worked as a writer, computer programmer and teacher (at the University of Wisconsin, University of Virginia, UCLA and UC·Riverside). He started a Christmas tree farm, which failed. He tried to begin an animated film business that would produce instructional aids. He is trying to raise venture capital for a computer hardware idea.
"For a while I wanted to be a psychoanalyst," he said, "but I am very satisfied with what I am doing now."
His wife is an attorney. Their combined income is about $100,000.
Other findings from The Examiner survey'
• One of every four is self-employed. Daniel Keig is a real estate mogul. David Kamornick is a lawyer in Los Angeles. Marvin Tener is a computer consultant back in his hometown, Philadelphia.
• Most of the rest are self-supervised. Michael Shub teaches mathematics at City College of New York. Joe Botkin drives a cab in Berkeley. Rodney Mullen administers a treatment center for drug and alcohol abuse in Tucson, Ariz.
• One in 10 is listed as a homemaker, but none of those seems to fit the conventional image. Ethel Jacoff Weinberger holds a teaching credential Peggy Hallum Slater has a law degree. David Wald, son of biologist and Nobel laureate George Wald at Harvard, takes care of the baby while his wife, a nurse, is at work.
• Of the others, 5 percent are students again. Michael Cortes, who worked with foundations and the national office of a La Raza organization in Washington, D.C., is back at Berkeley to work on his doctorate in public policy.
Elin Calvin, another progeny of a Nobel laureate, became a baker after she dropped out. She returned and received her bachelor's degree in philosophy, then decided to go on for a master's degree in clinical psychology.
• Only 4 percent work in blue-collar jobs or unskilled office work.
Devorah Rossman: "I didn't lightly take that risk to my academic career or personal being. It is frightening to stand up for what you believe. But for me it's necessary. It is necessary today."
***
The Charlie Brown file grew when his name, like those of other demonstrators, was checked by The Examiner's extensive library of past newspaper articles. In early 1965, Charlie Brown had jumped into the news when he declaimed enough taboo words to get himself arrested in what was known as the Filthy Speech Movement.The arrest failed to charm his fellow rebels, who predicted accurately that much of the public would confuse the right of on-campus political advocacy with the gratuitous use of forbidden verbs.
By then Brown had erected a teepee on the hill near Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. When police evicted him, he called it a temple. The revolution went one way; he went another.
In Berkeley the old grads still remember how Charlie sang a touch too loudly when they linked arms for "We Shall Overcome." His beard was too untrimmed; his hair was too long. His serape was too ethnic. When he wore a suit to court, his socks were too red.
Worse, he was too old, maybe 25 or so. Even among rebels, it was still the age of conformity, which called for conformity of age.
Someone circulated the word that Charlie Brown might be an FBI plant. In the context of Telegraph Avenue's political and cultural scene at the time, no court could have issued a sentence so cruel. Charlie was shunned by serious radicals.
Another story quotes Brown in court, telling a patient judge, "LSD is a true sacrament."
He was convicted anyway of possession of LSD. It had been stashed in a bronze cross he wore around his neck while campaigning for the Berkeley City Council in 1967.
He lost of course, and went to jail. His Berkeley days were over.
* * *
The 40-year-old looks back on himself at 20 and sees a distant relation, a person whose ambitions, affections, triumphs and fears seem slightly absurd.
—Ron Fimrite, the writer, in an article about the late Jackie Jensen, an athletic hero at Cal.
The FSM demonstrators came from different places and different backgrounds.
Mark Switzer, who attended a high school in Arizona with 110 students, suffered something like culture shock when he joined 27,000 others on the Berkeley campus in the fall of 1964. Marvin Tener came from Philadelphia, son of working class immigrants from Russia. Stephen Leonard's parents "were committed activists." The father of Ronald Hargreaves disapproved of civil disobedience.
At the time, a UC survey of FSM students showed that many of their parents came from service and labor-type jobs as from management or teaching. The median age was 21. Of the 783 who were arrested, 688 were registered students. The total included 141 graduate students.
A third of them were majors in social sciences, particularly political science, history and psychology. Only 1.65 percent were enrolled in professional schools.
A questionnaire-type survey at the time resulted in a well-publicized report that FSM demonstraors ranked higher scholastically than other students, but the actual grades were about the same.
Grades don't always reflect intellect. Hargreaves, an average student, had IQ scores of more than 150. For some, like mathematician William Knight, the FSM trial was resented because it cut into study time. In that semester, he said with regret, he received his only B.
As for Collins, his boyhood was spent in the rubble of postwar Berlin, where his father was posted by the State Department.
"My earliest memories are of the bombed-out city, the ruins," he said. "I can remember when we lost our dog. And Mom explained it was probably eaten by Germans because they were starving."
***
Earl Durand, Earl Durand,
Born too soon a mountain man
Shot down in the Tetons
By the law's bloodthirsty hand.
—From "Teton Tea Party"
sung by Charlie (Artman) BrownCharlie Brown's trail had, grown cold by 1984.
Jim Wood, The Examiner's food editor, found a Folkways recording, ''Teton Tea Party." The vocalist, accompanying himself vigorously on the
—See next page
From Vermont to Vishnu: Radicals' lives after Berkeley
—From preceding pageautoharp, was Charlie Brown.
The path led to Brooklyn. Publicist Andrew S. Kent said he produced the recording in 1967.
This was a long way from a secluded camp in the Grand Tetons, where rock climbers gathered in the 1960s. Kent said they would sing folk tunes and drink a semi-lethal cocktail called Teton Tea, a mixture of vodka, wine and anything left on the shelf.
"Lovely, lovely evenings," said Zimmer, now vicar of an Episcopal church in Twenty-Nine Palms. "People came from all over and exchanged music. Damn good music, too."
Charlie Brown, who had arrived in Jackson on a motorcycle In the late 1950s, particularly liked the tune about Earl Durand, a Wyoming individualist who died in a shootout.
Bill Briggs, a climber and songwriter usually credited with starting the Teton tea parties, recalled how Charlie behaved on what was, literally, the edge.
"When he took up rock climbing, he took foolish risks," he said. "He gave it up before he got killed."
When the Boohoo of the Berkeley Bag returned to Jackson in the early 1970s, Briggs said, he had changed with the times.
"He was dressed like Merlin the magician," said Dick Barker, another Wyoming acquaintance. "He said he was the reincarnation of Black Elk, or something. He is the most weird person I ever met."
Briggs said Charlie had returned to Wyoming in an ecumenical quest to bring all religions together.
Citizens of Jackson were unsympathetic. "He was more or less run out of town," said Briggs.
***
This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will rather die than be standardized, replaceable and irrelevant.
—Mario Savio, FSM spokesman inside Sproul HallSteve Robman sold chrome-plated toasters at Bloomingdale's during one bleak Christmas season, but he has worked steadily ever since as a movie director.
He tends to pick material that matches his political interests, such as an educational film about the Sandinistas, "Talking Nicaragua," with Susan Sarandon.
Mark Switzer chose instead to sail to the South Pacific, where he remained for five years. When he returned, he worked for environmental causes. Then he married, quit, took his savings and built his own home in 'Inverness. Last September he and his wife adopted a baby.
Elizabeth Blum moved to Vermont, became an occupational therapist for the local school district. She calls herself the house radical.
Shelagh Hickey Covington, who married a Chicago attorney, said she has become involved in three volunteer activities.
"First is a medical center in Chicago. I was president of the auxiliary board of the (Chicago) Art Institute. Thirdly, I am a director of Lincoln Park Zoo," she said. "People, paintings and animals."
Ronald Hargreaves, then working as a researcher for a sociology professor at UC, took his backpack above the campus in 1972 and killed himself with a revolver.
He would be the first of two suicides In the FSM statistical sample. The other, Anya Allister Sagara, killed herself a year ago in Berkeley. Both deaths were blamed on acute depression.
***
The chain of inquiries into Charlie's whereabouts led from Briggs to Steve Larson, one of the Teton climbers who now lives in New Paltz, N.Y. Larson mentioned Brian Carey in New York City.
Carey suggested Steve Roper in Oakland.
No, said Roper, he hadn't seen Charlie in 15 years or more.
Gloom.
But two years ago, he said, he saw a letter to the editor in Newsweek. It was signed by a Charles Artman.
Excitement.
At the magazine, a cordial librarian hunted up the letter. The return address was in Gainesville, Fla.
Jackpot.
Charles Artman was in the phone directory.
A voice with Midwestern flatness:
"Hello?"
"Is this Charles Artman?"
(Pause.)
"Yes."
"Is this Charlie Brown Artman?"
(Laughter.)
"Yes."
(The purpose of the call is explained)
"How in the f--- did you ever find me?"For now, the Rainbow Path ends in a small house trailer. On the walls are pictures of Jesus Christ and the Guru Maharaj-ji. Fish swim in glass tanks, the age of Aquarius.
Charlie is 45 years old, a student again. He is working on his undergraduate thesis in anthropology at the University of Florida. The subject is the evolution of consciousness, which he has printed on an endless scroll of computer paper.
"There is no mass, no time, no space," he said, "only bits of energy flitting around."
Nobody flitted with more energy in a life on the edge. In the late 1950s, Charlie had performed Pete Seeger songs, climbed rocks with dangerous abandon, drove a motorcycle wildly and drank from the wining jug, just like Jack Kerouac. In the 19605, he moved to Berkeley, joined the FSM protest, dropped acid and became a hippie.
After departing Wyoming in 1973, he said, took his quest to Denver, Salt Lake City, Europe and Miami. He followed the Mallaraj-ji.
"In a few years you might find me active again," he said. "Right now I am just taking a breather."
He hasn't taken an acid trip since 1969.
"Psychedelics are an important part of my evolution," he said. "Drugs and Scientology are responsible for where I am today."
He split up with his second wife, who lives in Miami with their 9-year, old son. He hopes to begin graduate work at Chico State University after he completes his bachelor's degree, but he is vague about the timetable.
His name is Artman.
It's the 1980s, and computers happen to be on the edge. Charles Artman is fascinated. He was in bed, working with his own household computer, when the phone rang.
He said, "I am waiting for a computer that will sit up and say, I think, therefore I am.'"
The Rainbow Path is only a memory. Charlie no longer despises organized religion.
"I still have long hair, but I'm not running around in a costume anymore," he said. "I do wear shoes to church."
Every Sunday, Charlie attends formal services at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He said he wants to be baptized as a Mormon, but his application is pending. In the meantime, he keeps busy by filing suits against the food-stamp bureaucrats who cut him off.
Twenty years after the Sproul Hall sit-in, the former Charlie Brown said people cannot change things through politics. The only meaningful change is spiritual, he said, by "plugging into the source of all creation."
He doesn't have a job. Since 1979 he has survived on $314 a month from SSI, or Supplemental Social Income, paid by the federal government to the disabled.
"I am," he said, "a burnout case."
***
"I don't think much about the past," said Collins. "I'm surprised at all the attention paid to the FSM. I hope people don't treat it as nostalgia."
His daughter went off to college this semester.
"A lot of people are down on kids today," he said.
He didn't mean young people are misbehaved. On the contrary.
"I think they have the potential for trying to put themselves in action for good causes," he said.
"As we did."
The courtroom courtship and other romances
Ethel Jacoff met Michael Weinberger in the courtroom where they stood trial during the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California in Berkeley.
Twenty years later she would remember her arrest ("so terrible") and the jail ("subhuman"), but her memory of court had turned to courtship ("a romance of the FSM").
A survey of the 1964 demonstrators by The Examiner shows most eventually got married, settled down and reared families—not necessarily in that order.
Almost 20 percent of FSM participants, like Ethel and Michael, married each other.
That’s an extrapolation. But of 49 men and women in a statistically valid sample, nine were married then or later to others who were arrested in Sproul Hall.
Only three of these marriages survived.
Compared to a similar demographic group, FSM veterans are less likely to be married now (75 percent to 52 percent) and more likely to be divorced without remarriage (23 percent to 14 percent).
Of the FSM sample, 4 percent are men and women who live together and 6 percent are lesbians with long-term relationships. No comparable figures were available from the comparison group.
Sixty-seven percent of the FSM demonstrators became parents. It's a figure higher than they might have predicted 20 years ago, but well below a national average of 84 percent for people of comparable age and education.
Joseph LaPointe, 50, a professor at New Mexico State, is the only grandfather in The Examiner's FSM sample of 49. Dana Kramer-Rolls has three step-grandchildren.
Many FSM veterans waited until their 30s to have children. More than half the kids are 12 or under.
"I didn't even get married until my early 30s," said Stephen Leonard, an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts and the father of two children, aged 7 months and 4 years: "I had a good time for a number of years."
He paused, then added: "My wife already knows about that."
Other comments on families, romances and marriage:
Martha Platt Bergmann —"I won't remarry unless I'm absolutely sure .... I have a close circle of friends who are just super. Like the root system of a plant, if something should happen to one root, I wouldn't go under."
Julie Wellings —"I live with another woman and am helping to raise a child. We have a committed relationship."
Ethel and Michael Weinberger, who were married 18 years ago, moved back to rural Vermont. He is an architect; she will resume teaching once her 3-year-old is off to school.
"I can now understand my parents' point of view," said Ethel. "It was worry."
She remembers they were "mostly frightened and horrified and supportive but thought it was dumb to get arrested."
And now it's her turn.
"I think about it in terms of my own 14-year-old son," she said. "How will I feel if my son goes through something like this?" He probably won't. She described him as far more conservative.
"And I would want him to participate in demonstrations."
WAS IT WORTH IT?
(figures in percent)
Yes 90
No 2
Don't know 2
No comment 6Remarks:
"It was a real catalyst moment for both the university and the whole country..."
—John Huntington, English professor"Yeah. It is hard to figure out all the consequences, though, including negative consequences. For example, Ronald Reagan came into government partly on the backs of the FSM—now he is in the White House. Ed Meese, Lowell Jensen and others came to prominence during the backlash. "
—Patricia Eliet, English professorBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
PLACE OF RESIDENCE
(figures in percent)
Berkeley 12
Other Bay Area 26
Other California 17
East Coast 22
Midwest 8
South 3
Southwest 1
Northwest 3
Out of the country 2Remarks:
"Among people in Berkeley .there's a trend toward gourmetism, hot tubs, etc., a hip, rich lifestyle.
It's not the way I want to go...."
—Keith Simons, importer in Portland"I came to Vermont and left Berkeley even before People's Park. I wasn't comfortable with the violent turn political action had taken."
—Ethel Jacoff Weinberger, former teacherBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
ARREST IMPACT ON JOBS
(figures in percent)
Positive 13
Negative 27
No effect 44
Not Sure 16Remarks:
"No. On the contrary, it was a plus. In my job, teaching school at Bethesda,·they really liked it. Others, it didn't hurt. It makes me feel good;·when people find out I was in the FSM, they get all excited about it."
—Kenneth Barter, alcohol education counselor"I wanted to be a teacher and applied at the Chicago Board of Education for an assistant teaching position. I went in and told them about the FSM arrest and they told me (in summer '67) that I was not suitable."
—Shelagh Hickey Covington, civic leaderBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
ANNUAL FAMILY INCOME
Highest: $200,000+
Average: $33,875Income level
(figures in percent)
FSM USA
Under $5,000 7 1
$5,000 to $9,999 11 2
$10,000 to $14,999 4 4
$15,000 to $24,999 21 28
$25,000 to $34,999 21 31
$35,000 to $49,999 18 20
$50,000 and over 18 14Remarks:
"Money is abused more than any other substance. People think that making $15,000 a year is OK, but $30,000 will make them twice as happy."
—Kenneth Barter, alcohol education counselor"Money…conveys freedom. It is not a value in itself but lets you play the games you want to play."
—Daniel Keig, real estate investor
FAMILY
Income level
(figures in percent)
STATUS FSM USA
Married 52 76
Never married 19 7
Divorced 23 14
Separated 4 3
Widowed 2 1Remarks:
"Married. Only once. Probably one of the few (FSM veterans) married continuously for 16 years."
—Keith J. Simons, importer"I have lived with a woman for 12 years. Does that count as an alternate lifestyle?I guess not. Oh, well…"
—Steve Robman, stage directorPARENTS
Any kids? FSM USA
Yes 67 84
No 33 16How many?
One child 34
Two children 38
Three children 28
More than three 0How old?
Under 5 19
5 to 12 36
13 to 18 29
19 to 22 10
Over 22 6Remarks:
"I had a grandson born last week. What kind of world do we want them to inherit? Not 1984."
—Joseph LaPointe, biology professor"I’d still like to have the wife and kids. Always thought revolutionaries should have kids. People who shape a society should understand the importance of another human life."
—Joe Botkin, taxi driver (single)
HOME OWNERSHIP
(figures in percent)
Yes 62
No 38HOME VALUE
Median value of homes in the sample $100,000
Average value $152,560Remarks:
"No home. No car. What we had was pretty well cleaned out by the divorce."
—Michael Cortes, UC graduate student"It’s worth about $65,000. In San Francisco it would be worth half a million."
—Gordon Bergsten, economics professorBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
Still to come in FSM series
IN TOMORROW'S EXAMINER
—Twenty years later, our survey shows former Free Speech Movement activists still believe strongly in a student's right to hear and experience political advocacy.TUESDAY—Disenchantment with politics has led most campus rebels of yesteryear into political inactivity. Most vote for Democrats, but a few have signed up as Republicans.
WEDNESDAY—They marched into Sproul Hall to shut down the odious education factory, but today a surprising percentage of FSM veterans are professors, teachers or university workers.
THURSDAY—After the exhilaration of the FSM, many activists rejected conventional lifestyles and searched for other ways to achieve goals of personal and psychic liberation.
FRIDAY—The FSM veterans worry about the environment, social inactivism and Nicaragua, but agree with surprising unity on the major issue of the 1980s—nuclear war.
The research and the researchers
Statistics in these reports come from an Examiner survey based on a random sample from 783 names on a list of Free Speech Movement activists arrested on Dec. 2-3, 1964.
Most results are based on questionnaires and in-depth interviews with a final survey group of 49. In some cases, the base number is · larger. The potential sampling error is plus or minus 16 "at the 95 percent confidence level." This would indicate it is reasonable to draw some basic inferences.
The "USA" comparison group, sharing similar age, race and education with the FSM sample, is a "selected subset" of 131 respondents from a 1980 study by the Center for Policy Studies at the University of Michigan.
Professor Richard Deleon, director of the San Francisco State University Public Research Institute, and Ed Emerson, a graduate student, generously helped with consultation and data preparation.
This series was researched and written by reporter Lynn Ludlow, who was involved 20 years ago in coverage of the FSM. He was assisted by staff writer George Frost. Series editor was deputy metropolitan editor Eric Best.
Researcher / reporter Jacqueline Frost, now with the Monterey Peninsula Herald, found Charlie Brown.
San Francisco Examiner
December 10, 1984
Two decades do not dim credos of the UC rebels
Agents of ChangeBy Lynn Ludlow and George Frost
Examiner staff writers
Second of six partsMany a Berkeley activist of 1964 paid a buck to hear the lectures of Hal Draper, a Marxist theorist who took a sardonic view of the Free Speech Movement.
Within a few years, he said, most of the rebels arrested Dec. 3 at the University of California would be "rising in the world and income, living in the suburbs, raising two or three babies, voting Democratic and wondering what on Earth they were doing in Sproul Hall—trying to remember, and failing."
Draper was wrong about their memory.
"The issue was the First Amendment right of free speech," said Michael Sheats, 38, now an architect. "The administration was trying to control political expression."
Similar answers came unhesitatingly from 71 percent of the men and women who were interviewed as part of a 20-years-later Examiner survey of the FSM's rank and file.
Most of those in the minority said free speech was only a part of some broader issue, such as civil rights. Sheats, no Mario Savio, was 19 at the time. He left the oratory to others when he sat down along with 782 others in the corridors of power.
"I was-a follower," said Sheats, who lives in Berkeley and calls himself a liberal Democrat. "I was just one of the spear carriers."
The spear carriers of 1964 haven't abandoned their position. Most of those in the survey sample still say that First Amendment rights extend to such controversial campus possibilities as revolutionary communists, Nazis and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.
On the other hand, only half the free speech rebels say they would go along with on-campus showings of bondage films, which several described as the ultimate test of the First Amendment:
"I still feel," said Sheats, ·'that the moral issue was very strong."
Julie Wellings, artist: "Any group that advocates violence should be protested but probably not banned."
David Wald, cabinetmaker: "Ba-
See Page A4, col. 1
Legacy of the FSM: Free speech still an issue
—From Page Al
sically, I'm against censorship."
Barbara Zahm, filmmaker: "This is a difficult question. I believe in free speech. I'd rather allow these destructive ideologies to be allowed to advocate than be threatened with censorship and tyranny. Individual liberty must be guarded."
Donna Watson, electrician: "I don't totally disapprove of hecklers. I think it's OK to shout."
Sheats shrugged and said, "Where do you draw the line? In a way, giving them the opportunity dissolves their mystique."
***
On university grounds open to the public generally, as may be defined in the campus regulations, all persons may exercise the constitutionally protected rights of free expression, speech, assembly, worship and sale of non-commercial literature incidental to the exercise of these freedoms.
Such activity shall not interfere with the orderly operation of the campus and must be conducted in accordance with campus time, place and manner regulations.
This paragraph, known as Section 31.14 of the official UC rules for 1984, is the legacy of the FSM.
Today when student groups reserve the Sproul Hall steps or the Lower Plaza for noon rallies, the university supplies the public address system, a technician and a plainclothes police officer.
Regulations spell out approved locations for the tables where student groups solicit volunteers and funds.
Nothing whatever is said about the content of speech, literature or other political activity.
It's a freedom taken for granted, perhaps because students of history often ignore the history of students.
The situation was considerably different under the late Robert Gordon Sproul (rhymes with growl), who became UC president in 1930. He didn't have a doctoral degree, but he grew up on the tough streets of the Mission District in San Francisco. During the next 28 years he sealed off the campuses from the interference of a world sometimes hostile to intellectual inquiry.
To keep the politicians on the outside while he built one of the world's great universities, Sproul banned anything that might appear to lend the university's name to off-campus issues. If the university were to get nonpartisan financial support from all the citizens, he wouldn't allow anyone to use the campus for partisan politics.
The first test came in 1934. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the lemon pie incident.
It was the nadir of the Depression. Throughout the nation, campuses had become forums for prophets of radical change.
At the Berkeley campus, rallies took place on a city street, Telegraph Avenue, which then extended north to Sather Gate.
In October, a free speech controversy arose over Sproul's summary suspension of five UCLA student leaders, including the student body president, for "alleged communistic activities." They had violated Sproul's rules by meeting on the campus to discuss statewide election issues.
Sympathizers in Berkeley called a "strike," which was actually a one-hour classroom boycott. It was strongly opposed by university officials, but more than 1,000 students gathered anyway outside Sather Gate.
According to California Monthly, the UC alumni magazine, the protest speakers were immediately shouted down by squadrons of hecklers.
"We have a Constitution," said a woman speaker, "that guarantees free speech and assembly."
Tomatoes and eggs splattered all around her. She began to cry.
"You might at least have the courtesy to listen," she said.
That's when a heckler had second thoughts about his lemon pie.
He didn't toss it. Instead, he broke it up and passed out the pieces "as a form of nourishment."
An investigation later showed 22 of the fraternity men at the event were volunteer agents for the American Legion's Americanism Committee.
It could have been worse.
In 1932, soldiers and sailors beat up students attempting to pass out antiwar leaflets outside the Army-Navy football game in Memorial Stadium.
In 1933, home-made tear gas bombs injured a member of the Social Problems Club as he sold its newspapers outside Sather Gate.
Among the interested observers in 1934 was a Quaker graduate student named Clark Kerr, who would get his doctorate in economics in 1938. The atmosphere changed. About 1,200 students heard Lillian Hellman a peace rally in 1938.
By 1941, 3,000 turned out for the last anti-war rally. It was said to be a success, but many pacifists like Kerr never forgot the day the Nazis invaded Russia. Many mimeograph machines of the peace movement began publishing demands for a second front.
Within a year, in any case, radicals and fraternity boys would all be in uniform.
And when the GI Bill veterans returned in the late Forties, they expressed scant interest in 'Overturning Sproul's network of regulations. These included the controversial Rule 17, which required his personal permission for any campus event involving off-campus political figures.
With the Fifties came the loyalty oath controversy, which brought Kerr to prominence as a liberal faculty opponent of the oath.
Sather Gate rallies were no longer possible after the university purchased both sides of Telegraph Avenue, extending the campus to Bancroft Way.
Several political leaders, including Richard Nixon and Adlai Stevenson, were obliged to speak to students from sound trucks on city streets.
"It appears strange to us and a little bit disillusioning," says the Daily Californian in a 1958 editorial, "that any university should have to take such an effort to relocate speakers off the Campus."
Although Kerr managed to liberalize the rules by 1964, content of speech was still regulated. Neil Smelser, a sociology professor and former president of the Academic Senate, said later, "The FSM and its aftermath were a series of accumulated small events, the import of which we were never aware of as it kept unfolding."
The "Bancroft Strip," a 26-foot section of sidewalk, had become the university's unofficial Hyde Park where activists would set up card tables for political literature and signup sheets.
Then someone complained about recruitment of student volunteers for Gov. William Scranton of Pennsylvania, the only serious opponent to Barry Goldwater at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. Records showed the university owned the strip, not the city.
When the fall term began, university administrators ordered student groups to quit recruiting and raising funds for off-campus causes. The subsequent protests led to changes, but the orders were ultimately defied by activists who contended that students should not bargain away their First Amendment rights.
When students were cited, the result was a 10-hour sit-in Sept. 30 in Sproul Hall. It ended after eight students were suspended by Chancellor Edward Strong. On Oct. I, campus police arrested a former graduate student, Jack Weinberg, for distributing materials from CORE (Congress on Racial Equality). Other students surrounded the police car, which was trapped (with Weinberg inside) for 32 hours. As hundreds of police gathered nearby, the incident ended with an agreement between student leaders and President Kerr.
Kerr refused to bend on rules against solicitation of funds or recruitment of volunteers for illegal activities away from the campus, such as the sit-ins at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
Kerr, perhaps remembering Sather Gate days, also said the hard-core demonstrators included "at times as much as 40 percent off-campus elements." Among them were identified Communist sympathizers, he said. The remark was seen by FSM leaders as classic red baiting.
The FSM had little support from student government or the Daily Californian, but noon rallies began to draw large crowds. The crisis came when Strong went ahead with plans to suspend FSM leaders.
The all-night sit-in at Sproul Hall Dec. 2 and 3 resulted in 783 arrests on the orders of Gov. Edmund G. Brown. Kerr, noted as a mediator and compromiser, then took over from campus officials and called a special convocation a few days later in the Greek Theater. He announced plans to work out more liberalized regulations. But FSM spokesman Mario Savio was dragged from the stage after he tried to take the microphone. Eventually, Savio was allowed to make an announcement, but the professors were shocked.
The faculty voted overwhelmingly on Dec. 8 to urge an end to restrictions on the content of campus political activity.
The UC regents met in December to adopt provisional rules, which allowed students the same right as all citizens to engage in activism without having to get a note from their dean.
The impact reached far beyond Telegraph Avenue.
"It spread to other institutions and became worldwide," said Strong, who lost his job as chancellor.
Lewis Feuer, a sociologist whose views became so unpopular on Sproul Plaza that he departed for Toronto, wrote a fat book called "The Conflict of Generations." It linked the FSM with other notable events involving students, such as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Feuer wrote, "'Berkeley' became a byword throughout North America for a generation running amok ... a symbol for student generational militancy."
The Sproul Hall sit-in may have been the first major campus protest action, but it wasn't the last. Hundreds of demonstrations broke out against the Vietnam War, the draft, military recruiting and racial discrimination. The New Left was born in 1962, spread out by 1965, mushroomed by 1967 and disintegrated by 1969 into quarrelsome factions. The war continued.
The National Student Association estimated 221 demonstrations by 40,000 students at 101 campuses in the first six months of 1968 alone.
The FSM was significant, said Professor Smelser.
"It was one of those historical incidents that will forever shape the memory, and to a degree, the institutional life of the university."
At the time, he added, nobody but the FSM leaders appreciated the importance of their victory.
"The movement fragmented almost immediately," he said.
The fragments included Sheats, who said he dropped out of activism within a relatively short time.
Sheats remembers the FSM. Vividly.
"It was a whirlwind of power," he said. "Once you touched it, it was hard to study for your history midterm."
During the Christmas break in 1964, the Board of Regents met to reconsider the Sproul-Kerr rules that prohibited most campus activism.
Sheats went home one night and found himself shaking hands with the blue-suited dinner guests of his father, Paul H. Sheats, then dean of the university statewide extension system.
The visitors were the distinguished chancellors from other UC campuses, intensely curious about the Berkeley situation.
Mike Sheats was a certified lawbreaker.
"It was an awkward dinner," he said.
"Then the guy from Davis Mrak) asked what I thought. So I gave a little speech. It ended up we could understand each other."
The FSM arrest was his first and last.
"Afterwards, everything became too diluted," he said. ''Those marches in the 1960s were great, but now I follow more my own career. I feel my work for change is best within the context of my profession."
Still to come in FSM series
TOMORROW—Disenchantment with politics has led most campus rebels of yesteryear into political inactivity. Most vote for Democrats, but a few have signed up as Republicans.
WEDNESDAY—They marched into Sproul Hall to shut down the odious education factory, but today a surprising percentage of FSM veterans are professors, teachers or university workers.
THURSDAY—After the exhilaration of the FSM, many activists rejected conventional lifestyles and searched for other ways to achieve goals of personal and psychic liberation.
FRIDAY—The FSM veterans agree with surprising unity on the major issue of the 1980s. Their generation and their children, they say, face annihilation in event of nuclear war.
WHAT WAS THE MAIN ISSUE OF THE FSM?
(Figures in percent)Right to advocacy on campus...........................70
Free speech as part of broader issues...............25
Other.................................................................5Remarks:
"It had limited aims. To tell the administration that we should have the right to solicit funds for the civil rights struggle in the South: I was not fighting a multiversity or a stifling bureaucracy. I loved the university back then."
—Gordon Bergsten, economics professor"In a sense (the main issue) was the corruption of the university. (Oakland Tribune publisher William) Knowland didn't like the demonstrations, and the university acted to pacify him. The people who ran the institution were immoral, repressive agents of the large corporatlons!'
—Michael Marcus, Portland attorney"It was a basic First Amendment issue."
—Ethel Jacoff Weinberger"There Were different issues for those involved. I was involved in the civil rights movement. For the university the issue was to keep on the good side of the governor and Legislature. For students, it was the right of political expression on campus."
—Jeremy Bruenn, biophysicistTHE 1984 PERSPECTIVE
Do you see the issues differently today?
(Figures in percent)Yes.................24
No..................74
Don't know.......2Remarks:
"No. That's one period of my life I'm certain of. Now my actions are more personal, less idealistic. Now my responsibility is to raise three kids and make their life better."
—Peggy Hallum, homemaker"No. It may be that the activity we engaged in then planted a seed that was later carried into careers and more traditional activism."
—Martha Platt Bergmann, gardenerBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS
(Figures in percent)Should it apply to: Yes No Don't know
Revolutionary communist groups 98 10 2
U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick 93 5 2
Films of women In bondage 55 31 14
American Nazi Party and KKK 88 12 0Remarks:
Revolutionaries
"Yes. You can't have it one way and not the other. Truth stands on its own two·feet. Let it speak. The false will fall to the ground.
—Dennis Peacocke, ministerNazis and KKK
"I don’t believe in free speech for groups that advocate genocide."
—David Bacon, union organizer"The movement was more a power struggle than a First Amendment issue. But, yes, we have to let them on campus."
—Marvin Tener, computer consultantJeane Kirkpatrick
"When a government official comes to campus and is booed, that can be more in the line of a public demonstration. They generally have no trouble having their views known."
—Michael Shub, mathematician"I don’t think people should stop her from speaking but they have the right to put up their placards and ask her some questions."
—Keith Simons, importer"Yes. She should have the same rights of speech. But not freedom from heckling. You can’t enforce anti-heckling without abridging freedom of speech."
—Mark Switzer, environmentalistBondage films
"That is a hard one. I guess I would have to day yes—but women would have the right to picket and urge people not to attend."
—William Knight, mathematicianBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
page A5
60 years of protest: Chronology of the Free Speech MovementPROTESTS
A Selective Chronology: 1906-19631906
• "The revolution is here," says writer Jack London, who might be called a UC dropout. He becomes the favorite lecturer of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Members include Walter Lippmann and Paul H. Douglas. London, who toured the nation, concluded, "Stop it if you can!"1920
• Upton Sinclair, author of "The Jungle" and a sometimes Socialist candidate for governor, is denied the right to speak at UC-Berkeley.1948
• Former Vice President Henry Wallace, presidential candidate of the Independent Progressive Party, is refused permission to speak at UC.1951
• UC regents ban Communist Party speakers from campus.1959
• UC administrators forbid student government leaders from speaking "for students" on off-campus issues.1960
• In February, four freshmen at North Carolina A& T stage the first "sit-in" at a whites'only lunch counter in Greensboro.• Caryl Chessman, a sex criminal and kidnapper, loses his last appeal and dies in the San Quentin Prison gas chamber. UC-Berkeley march to the prison in protest.
• UC students and others are hosed down the steps of San Francisco City Hall during protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee.
1961
• Segregationists attack a Freedom Ride bus at Anniston, Ala.1962
• Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is founded in Port Huron, Mich., as a left·liberal reformist organization.• Christian Anti·Communist Crusade comes to Oakland, but denunciations by clergy, congressmen and notable citizens begin the end of the Fred Schwarz version of the radical right.
• Compulsory ROTC, an issue for five years, becomes voluntary at UC.
• James Meredith enrolls at the University of Mississippi, first black student in Ole Miss history. Federal marshals fight off 4,000 white students and local segregationists in a riot that kills a newsman and a bystander.
1963
• The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom draw's 200,000 to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say, "I have a dream," and conclude, "Free at last."• Kennedy speaks at Charter Day rites at UC·Berkeley; activist groups picket in protest.
• A bomb in a Birmingham Sunday school kills four black girls.
• UC students remain largely uninvolved as Berkeley voters repeal a city open housing law, 22,720 to 20,325.
• The UC ban on Communist Party speakers is lifted. Mickey Lima becomes the first CP member to speak on the Berkeley campus since 1951.
• Berkeley CORE organizes equal·opportunity employment rallies at Mel's Drive·in in San Francisco (111 arrests) and Mel's Berkeley (180 pickets).
1964
• Aftershock from the killing of President John F. Kennedy in late 1963 leads to widespread cynicism when the Warren Commission concludes in September that a single crank, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been responsible.• The popular president had been succeeded by Lyndon B. Johnson. In August, Congress supplies him with war powers after reports that U.S. ships had been attacked by North Vietnamese aircraft in the Gulf of Tonkin. At the time, 150 Americans had died in Vietnam.
• In San Francisco, hundreds of UC students and other demonstrators are hauled off to jail from the Sheraton·Palace Hotel. Earlier demonstrations include a "shop-in" at Lucky stores and sit-ins, with arrests, in auto dealerships. Although demands are heard for punishment of students involved, UC President Clark Kerr says the university can't interfere with what students do off the campus — but students can't bring advocacy on campus.
• Dozens of UC students, including Mario Savio and Stephen Weissman, are among the 650 volunteers involved in the Mississippi Summer Project, organized by SNCC (Student Non·Violent Coordinating Committee), to help with registration campaigns that bring 40,000 black voters into the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
• Urban riots break out in Harlem and other cities, previews to the Watts riot of 1965 and the Detroit riot of 1967.
• In November, California voters kill the Rumford Fair Housing Act, Proposition 14, through a referendum.
• Johnson is elected by a landslide after creating "The Great Society" in a battle of slogans with Republican conservative Barry Goldwater.
• The year marks the first widespread distribution of LSD out of the laboratory and into the pads. The Beatles revolutionize pop music with a nationwide tour that includes San Francisco. Oral contraceptives become widely available.
San Francisco Examiner
December 11, 1984
Free Speech patrimony scatter to the winds
Agents of ChangeBy Lynn Ludlow and George Frost
Examiner staff writers
Third of six partsDavid Bacon, who 20 years ago marched into Sproul Hall, today recalls the "tremendous release of energy" that he associates with collective political action.
"People themselves are transformed," said the 36-year-old union organizer. "You are out there beyond the experience of everyday reality, opening up to change."
He waits.
Interviewed during an Examiner survey of activists arrested in the Free Speech Movement, Bacon doesn't have much company from his fellow demonstrators of yesteryear at the University of California in Berkeley. Twenty years later, few of them take part in protest politics, according to the survey.
Steve Gabow became disillusioned.
David Witt returned, he said, to the real world.
Michael Shub said mathematics, not politics, is his main interest
In the survey of onetime FSM activists, most said they haven't been arrested since Sproul Hall.
Most said they don't demonstrate, don't belong to "activist groups" and don't take an active role in electoral
—See Page A4, col. 1
Rank-and-file returned to the 'real world'
—From Page Al
politics. Many don't even vote.
"It still thrills me when I see a demonstration," said Kenneth Barten, 43, an alcohol education counselor in
Virginia. "I can empathize."***
The Big Chill"I didn't see it," said Patricia Eliet, 48, now a professor of English lit Cal State Dominguez Hills. "Deliberately not."
The 1983 movie is all about Harold and Sarah and Meg and Michael 8lld Nick and Karen and Sam and how they interact, as the saying goes, with the suicide of an unfocused but brilliant 1960s radical named Alex. Their idealism has faded.
Eliet said, "My understanding is that the movie is about revolutionaries turned Yuppies. I just don't care."
Lynne Hollander, now a clinical psychologist, was involved for more than 10 years in prison reform, civil rights and the Citizens Party.
"The people I know have remained active, although I myself am not particularly active now," said Hollander, 43, who is married to the FSM's best-known spokesman, Mario Savio.
"I am busy raising a child," she said. "Did you see 'The Big Chill'? It was a very good movie, but... Nobody I know is like that."
***
Scholars digging into the distant 60s tend to say activists have remained activists.
Joseph DeMartini, a Washington State University sociologist and author of "Social Movement Participation" said various reports suggest "former activists make up a disproportionate number of those involved in 1980s social movements."
But results of The Examiner survey don't jibe with this belief. The survey responses also conflict with expectations of FSM activists at the time. In 1964, surveyed by fellow student Glenn Lyons, first-time demonstrators agreed 2 to 1 they would become more active politically.
Wirt said he was "apolitical before the FSM and apolitical today." Now 40 and an an electronics engineer in Berkeley who works with rock bands, he said he was active at one time with the Progressive Labor Party. He quit, he said, because, "You have got to live in the real world. You try not to compromise, but..."
Shub, 42, a professor of mathematics at City College of New York, said, "It's a matter of time. Politics is not my major interest. Math is. And I have a kid I raise."
Gabow, 42, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University, said he dropped out of the Socialist Workers Party but sometimes turns up for protests. He was among the 1,100 arrested this year at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Bacon, on the other hand, is involved in several causes at once. He demonstrates regularly. He has been arrested so often that he lost count.
"You need a mass movement to change society," he said. "To build a mass movement you need a core of committed activists."
***
Wendy Chapnick
She wasn't famous. Like most of the FSM demonstrators moved by the eloquent fury of their peers, Wendy Chapnick attracted little attention to herself when they filed into Sproul Hall.
She received a relatively light sentence ($150 fine, probation, no jail time). Graduated in 1967 with a degree in social science, she settled in Philadelphia and became a union staff member. Although ill with the flu in January 1973, Chapnick arose from bed join a protest delegation that stood in cold rain outside the inauguration ceremonies for President Richard M. Nixon's second term.
She came down with viral encephalitis, a complication of her influenza. Within 10 days she was dead. Her parents, still too grief stricken to discuss it, blame Nixon.
***
Once they marched with The Movement and raised their left fists in radical solidarity, but those in the survey sample said they are mostly (86 percent) registered Democrats who preferred Mondale (80 percent). A few (5 percent) are Republicans.
"I'm not an ardent Republican," said Berkeley attorney David Tussman, 38, whose father, Joseph Tussman, remains a member of the UC faculty. "But I believe Republicanism basically works better."
Bacon said he supported Gus Hall and Angela Davis, the Communist Party write-in candidates.
Barter, the man who says demonstrations thrill him, said he hasn't voted since 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson faced Republican contender Barry Goldwater.
"He portrayed Goldwater as a war-mongering maniac and turned around and escalated the war himself."
Although the 1964 sit-in is often described as the turning point for a generation of idealists, most (69 percent) choose in 1984 to express their idealism through other means. Many (29 percent) of the FSM alumni prefer to give donations.
"I guess I'm too busy with my life, my career, my family," said William J. Knight, 44, now a mathematics profesor in the Midwest. "I guess sometimes I have guilty feelings about that."
Mark Desmet, 42, who owns a computer firm in Mountain View, said, "CORE (Congress on Racial Equality) disappeared a long time ago. The antiwar movement dissolved when the war ended. I now support Amnesty International. With donations."
Relatively few ex-demonstrators (23 percent) say they are involved in "activist groups."
Julie Wellings, 41, a jewelry artist in Ojai, said, "I cannot afford the time."
Fresno physician John Reinsch said, "I always had trouble with the activist personality. Very few were unselfish, tolerant and giving."
Gordon Bergsten, an assistant professor of economics at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., said, "At age 43 there are a lot of things I do differently today. Even basketball. My goals are similar. But my body is a little slower."
The survey produced but one unanimous answer. Every respondent said the FSM experience was worth it.
"I wouldn't have missed it for the world," said Michael Cortes, 42. "I had intended to play violin chamber music. I wound up getting a degree in social action."
***
Sara Davidson Now a well-known writer, she was a member of the Class of '64. Although she missed the FSM itself, she described protest days in her novel, "Loose Change," a fictional account of three onetime roommates in a UC sorority.
"In Susie's memory, the years from 1965 to 1967 are a jumble of meetings, teach-ins, marches and talk, endless talk. "Words were changing so fast. Negroes became blacks. Libcrals became scum. God was declared dead.
"There was a New Morality, a New Journalism, a New Music and a new way of looking at everything, and out of it all, a New Left!"
***
Most of them would do it again, given the same circumstances.
"There was something poignant about the Sixties," said Lee Goldblatt Nixon, 41, a former teacher in San Rafael. "There was a desire for a more humane state, a spiritual hunger." This hunger has long fascinated Michael Rossman, a Berkeley writer who. calls himself "the FSM's chief mystical propagandist."
He wrote, "We were cast into a desperate spontaneous democracy, which was our ultimate and only magic,"
Mario Savio said, "For a moment all hypocrisy was swept away and we saw the world with greater clarity than we had before."
Saul Landau wrote, "What enlivened the FSM was the exhilaration of feeling that you were, for once, really acting, that you were dealing directly with the things that affect your life, and with each other."
From this experience came the New Left, as it was called, which spurned at first the doctrines, feuds and rivalries of Marxist groups on campus. During FSM days, the Old Left organizations for students included the W.E.B DuBois Club (Communist Party), Young Socialist Alliance (Socialist Workers Party), May 2nd Movement (Progressive Labor Party), Independent Socialist Club (Trotskyist) and Spartacist Youth League.
Instead, demonstrators of 1964 defined The Movement through action, "The idea was to put your own body on the line," said Rodney Mullen, 41, a former Synanon official who now administers an alcohol-rehabilitation center in Arizona.
Students for a Democratic Society, which had come to represent the changing New Left, collapsed in 1969 after a ruinous convention fight. It was won by the faction called Weatherman, which went underground with a program of bombs and bullets.
Many FSM veterans said the New Left led to more positive causes, such as the women's movement, which came of age in the 70s, and the anti-nuclear movement, which has gone back to the civil disobedience tactics of 1964.
Bacon, now a veteran activist, said the FSM was important.
"It woke up students across the country. It brought the Vietnam war to the fore. Students brought the tactics of the civil rights movement to Berkeley. It helped write an end to McCarthyism. It served as a model for later actions," he said."
(Demonstrators against apartheid policies in South Africa marched last week to the statewide administrative headquarters, University Hall, to protest the university's links with South Africa; 38 were arrested.)
Only 16 years old during the FSM, Bacon said he learned that political commitment has consequences. he said he was beaten after his arrest and held in solitary confinement without clothes.
"It made me a more committed person," he said. "When thousands of people get together, like the FSM or the farm workers, you realize you can change the world."
For a few other FSM veterans in the survey group, protest became a way of life.
They include Big Bill Miller, known also as Buffalo, who stands 6-5 and lives in Monte Rio. Never a UC student, Miller said he has been arrested in attempts to block the troop trains in Berkeley (1965), at the Navy recruiting table on campus (1966), at Provo Park (1968) and many other occasions.
***
Civil Disobedience
He had been arrested often in non-violent demonstrations. He was noted as a quick and ruthless debater in Sproul Plaza. Friends said he wasn't really arrogant, just shy. He was dragged out of Sproul Hall.
They say he began dropping acid in the late 60s after he had founded an underground newspaper in San Francisco, It vanished. Word came that his wife had divorced him. He moved away.
Ten years later, on a Saturday morning in 1978, BART police reported that a man in his 90s had tried to kill himself by jumping in front of a train at the Rockridge Station. It was the same ex-activist who came back to Berkeley to die. Instead, he fell unhurt between the rails.
Officers switched off the third rail. They approached the would be suicide to escort him to a psychiatric clinic.
He went limp.
***
Many FSM activists said they left the movement when it turned from civil disobedience to more violent forms of protest.
Mullen said the development was no surprise.
"In some ways violence was a natural development with people getting arrested all those times. Some said, 'I'll fight back.'"
Reporters standing outside Sproul Hall in 1964 could see Oakland police dragging limp demonstrators down the marble stairs. After the windows were covered, reporters could still hear the thump, thump, thump.
Wirt said he was reclassified 4F in the draft because of the way he was arrested in Sproul Hall.
"The cops were dragging people off, and I climbed up on somebody's shoulders to take a picture," he said. '''This cop grabbed my neck in the crook of his arm and held me off the ground. It crushed a disk in my neck."
Bacon compared The Movement with a train.
"You don't know where it's going to go. Or if you're going to win or lose. You're outside the pale of society. You have to find new friends, ask new questions. You start this train going and you have a sensation of movement, as if you're going somewhere.
"While taking responsibility for your actions, the movement becomes part of you, and you are partly responsible for the movement. It teaches you the unimportance of individualism. Those who tripped out on themselves came to a rocky end."
***
Commitment Shelagh Hickey Covington, a Chicago civic leader, said: "So, yes, I learned how satisfying and exciting deep commitment can be." Pause, "I'm rambling," she continued, "because a small child is tugging at me."
•
PRESIDENTIAL PREFERENCE
(figures in percent)Mondale …………. 80
Reagan …………... 10
Other …………….. 10
based on a representative sample of FSM activists.Remarks:
I'd say for the Democratic guy. Who? Mondale?
—David R. Wald, cabinetmaker"Gus Hall and Angela Davis."
—David Bacon, union organizer"I'd like to see a wider spectrum of alternatives."
—Gordon Bergsten, economics professor"No one. I would have voted for Jackson if he had been nominated."
—Mark Desmet, computer programmerVOTING HISTORY
(For president; figures in percent)U.S.•• FSM•
1980
Carter ............ 20 66
Reagan .......... 43 5
Other ............. 13 10
Didn’t vote … 24 311976
Carter ......................... 54
Ford ............................. 2
Other ......................... 10
Didn't vote ................ 221972
McGovern .................. 65
Nixon: .......................... 2
Other ............................ 2
Didn't vote .................. 31
• A representative sample of FSM activists.
•• A nationwide sample
comparable in age, race and education.POLITICAL DEMONSTRATIONS
(figures in percent)Yes ………………….. 19
No .............................. 69
Occasionally .............. 10
No answer..................... 2Remarks:
"I nearly did last year. The occasion was the 15th anniversaryof the assassination of Martin Luther King, But we got bumped off the bus at the last moment."
—Gordon Bergsten, economics professor"Fury is a wonderful thing if it can be channeled."
—Mark Switzer, environmentalistbased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
ACTIVISM TODAY
(figures in percent)Still involved in activist groups?
Yes ………………….. 22
No .............................. 78Reasons for non-activism
Lack of time ………………. 9
Lack of motivation
or interest ………………... 5
Interested in personal
not social change ……….. 19
No longer active
but contributes money ….. 29
No longer believes
activism is viable ………… 7
Issues are not
important enough …..…….. 2
Plans to become
active again ………………. 5
No answer …..……………. 24Tomorrow: The Education Factory
FSM leaders keep the·faith: 'Still agitating' after all these years
By George Frost
Examiner staff writerBettina Aptheker, often accused of leading the Communist Party contingent of the FSM, readily admits it.
With one proviso.
"Actually," she said, "I was the only Communist in the movement."
Today she is a dropout from the party.
A teacher of women's studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she said that feminism, not communism, is the focus for her political activism.
Her break from the party came about five years ago, she said, when the party's publisher objected to the feminist outlook of a book she had written.
She called it a difficult personal decision because it meant a break with her family.
The daughter of Herbert Aptheker, a man invariably described as a Communist Party theoretician, she said her upbringing in Brooklyn was unconventional and highly political.
At age 16 she walked her first picket line.
During the FSM, she said, she had "no conception of a woman-oriented perspective" and said her social life back then was confusing.
"I was treated just like one of the boys," she said. "Of course, I wasn't."
The women's movement, she said, grew partly out of a rejection of macho '60s politics.
"Women did most of the basic work, filing and sorting," she said. "Men got the publicity and made the decisions."
She is at work on a sixth book, "A Labor of Love: Women's Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Life."
"Through women's studies, I combine the teaching with a kind of activism, sometimes anti-war, or anti-racism —but it really stems from my women's work," she said. "That is my center."
•
While she doesn't spend most of her time marching, picketing and blocking the corridors of power, Aptheker's quiet activism appears typical of the FSM leadership of 1964. Now in their 40s, with careers to pursue and families to worry about, most of them remain active in efforts to bring change.
They work for a variety of causes: feminism, trade unionism, peace, environmentalism and others. The struggle, they say, goes on.
•
Peter Franck, a San Francisco attorney who specializes in entertainment and copyrights, said he relishes his days as a student radical.
With fervor, he said, "We worked together to change society."
Franck co-founded the prototype Berkeley student activist group SLATE in 1957. It raised money for Freedom Riders in the South, staged peace marches, protested the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings in 1960, opposed compulsory ROTC, picketed businesses in behalf of equal employment opportunity and worked for changes in campus rules that barred activist politics.
"The FSM was an extension of the political action of 1957 on," he said. Unlike the FSM, he said, which enjoyed mass student support but had little infrastructure, SLATE members built an organization.
Many former members, he said, are activists "through our professional work."
Franck is president of the Pacifica Foundation, which operates member-supported Berkeley radio station KPFA and others. The foundation suppports lobbying and legal action against the networks to stanch what he calls the violence, sexism and racism coming from the tube.
"We are trying to make the mass media accountable to those they serve"
•
Jack Weinberg, the FSM's tactician, coined a '60s slogan when he told a reporter, "We have a saying in the movement, 'Don't trust anyone over 30.'"
He is 44.
Today, he said, young activists should reject their elders, even venerable veterans of the FSM.
Weinberg, who calls himself a permanent activist, was recently laid off at a steel mill in Gary, Ind. He said he seeks a new career.
He has worked for a halt to construction of an Indiana nuclear plant, for environmental causes and for the Democrats during the past presidential campaign.
The legacy of the FSM, he said after an October reunion this year in Berkeley, became "a crushing burden for young people today."
He said, "When we were in the FSM, there were no antecedents, no one telling us what to do."
Each generation, he said, must create its own unique form of activism.
•
Stephen Weissman, usually considered the chief strategist of the FSM, is now a writer and film producer in London. His latest projects include a book, "The Islamic Bomb," and a film about guns in America.
•
On Halloween, Mario Savio took his 4year-old son trick-or-treating in their Russian Hill neighborhood. The boy was costumed as Superman.
It's been an uneventful life for Savio, 43, who is now a graduate student and teaching assistant in physics at San Francisco State University. Most of the students have never heard of him. This is OK by him.
In 1964, Savio's eloquent fury inspired thousands of students with his call to "throw yourselves upon the gears ..."
After the '60s came silence.
Born in 1942, he was reared in the same working class Queens neighborhood as Geraldine Ferraro, Mario Cuomo and the fictional TV character, Archie Bunker. Savio's Sicilian father supported the family as a sheet metal worker.
At Queens College, Savio presided over the Fraternity of Christian Doctrine. In the summer of 1963, he helped build a laundry near Taxco, Mexico. The next summer he taught in a Mississippi freedom school.
Savio, who insisted on disbanding the FSM, was arrested again in 1966 with other activists protesting an armed forces recruiting table at the UC campus. He ran unsuccessfully for the state Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.
Then he disappeared from public view.
He was divorced from his wife, FSM leader Suzanne Goldberg, who kept custody of their two children. (She now lives in Washington, D.C., working in the mental health field and is married to a public interest attorney.)
Savio worked in a bookstore, spent several years in Los Angeles and avoided public appearances. Friends called him a victim of the revolution.
He broke his long silence at the October reunion.
Comparing civil rights struggles of the '60s to Nicaragua today, he said, "Either we succeed in making it the Mississippi of this generation or it will be the Vietnam of this generation."
He proposed that a delegation of activists visit Nicaragua as paying guests to forestall any U.S. invasion. Two months later he told The Examiner that his own role regarding Nicaragua is "not yet determined."
Savio is sensitive to what he called the media's tendency to transform political activists into celebrities. "Leader" is a label that embarrasses him.
He is active in the Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador.
"Right now," he said, "even without an overt invasion, the U.S. is trying to wreck the economy of Nicaragua by forcing Nicaragua into a continuous war economy. Forty percent of the budget is given over to defense."
Savio is married to clinical psychologist Lynne Hollander, another FSM veteran.
He called his re-emergence into public life "difficult."
•
Jerry Rubin, a Chicago 7 defendant and co-founder of the Yippies, was a graduate student in sociology when the FSM hit Berkeley. Rubin wasn't arrested in Sproul Hall because, he said, he was writing a book about it.
Later he would write, "I was born in the FSM in Berkeley in 1964."
A 1977 letter to the now-defunct Berkeley Barb took a contrary view and said Rubin "can't be said to have either survived or not survived, since he never really existed."
After a stint as a stockbroker, Rubin runs what he calls "networking salons." He urges former radicals to "play by the rules and go in and use the system, enjoy what's good about it, and change it for the better."
As a young urban professional, he teams up with Abbie Hoffman, his partner when they founded the Youth International Party, in a series of "Yippie vs. Yuppie" debates. Admission is charged.
•
Art Goldberg has a stock reply for retrospective questions about the '60s: "I'm still agitating."
The former FSM steering committee member is founding partner of a leftist, co-operative law firm in East Los Angeles called the Working People's Law Center.
Laughing, he said, "We tried to think of the most subversive name."
He said he combines advocacy law with such bread-and-butter legal work as criminal trials and divorces.
Outside the courtroom, Goldberg and the woman he lives with are active in the Committee in Support of the People of EI Salvador and the New Jewish Agenda, which provides sanctuary to political refugees from Central America in synagogues and private homes.
"There are probably 250,000 undocumented Central Americans in Los Angeles," he said. "It is a massive problem. Everyone of them should be given asylum. But Reagan only offers asylum to fascists."
Goldberg said the FSM did not so much shape his ideology as give him an enduring faith in activism. "The people united not only can't be defeated but can do anything they want," he said. "It takes the right historical situation."
•
Jacqueline Goldberg, former FSM activist and Art's sister, said she "opted out" of politics after the '60s. She recently re-enrolled. After leading the Integration Proj-
—See next page
Now in their 40s, they’re still activists
—From preceding page
ect for Los Angeles schools in 1979-81, she was elected to the Board of Education. Goldberg, who teaches at Dominguez High School in Compton, became a precinct worker for the Democratic Party.
"I am not a lifelong Democrat," she said. "In fact I registered about six months ago. But I don't believe that my generation is stuck in the Big Chill. Many are activists engaged in electoral politics."
At the reunion, wearing a tailored suit, she seemed an unlikely former radical. Growing up in Los Angeles, Goldberg played a glockenspiel in her high school band, won Girl of the Year honors from both the Rotary and the Daughters of the American Revolution and served as the pledge mother of Delta Phi Epsilon at Berkeley.
"Even nice girls," she said, "can be activists."
• Michael J. "Mad Mike" Smith was the standard bearer of the FSM. Twenty years later, he still holds the flag high.
Over the years, Smith was active in the FSM, the Vietnam Day Committee, civil rights protests and Stop the Draft demonstrations at the Oakland Induction Center in 1967.
They cried, "Hell no, we won't go."
One of the Oakland Seven, he was acquitted of conspiracy after a highly publicized, two-month trial.
These days he is registered nurse and a business representative for Hospital and Institutional Workers Union Local 250. He testified before an Assembly committee on aging about problems in convalescent hospitals.
"Believe it or not, at the time of the FSM I was in a fraternity and was working as a guard in the evenings at San Quentin," he said. "I was fired the very day of the sit-in around the police car because I protested the inhumane conditions out there."
He said he listened to speeches given from atop the crumpled roof and was convinced.
"I spent six months in Mississippi and was arrested three times," he said.
That's where he started displaying an American flag.
"I strongly believe that the flag belongs to progressives," he said. "We don't have to surrender it to the right wingers."
•
Michael Rossman, an FSM steering committee member who teaches in Berkeley, has written three books and numerous articles exploring the social and philosophical ramifications of the FSM and other '60s movements.
In "New Age Blues" he wrote: "In confronting social authority as directly and totally as we did, saying no and yes in an integral act, we broke suddenly beyond the frames that bound our perceptions and our definitions of our identity, into a primal, inchoate space."
The two years after—filthy speech and war
CALENDAR OF CHANGE A Selective Chronology
1965
□ The Vietnam War escalates with landings of Marines and Army ground. units, the first . heavy bombings in February. The Vietnam Day Committee at UC·Berkeley organizes attempts to stop troop trains. More than , 14,000 demonstrators march to the Oakland border, where police halt the parade.□ A non-student writes "f- - - " on a placard at UC-Berkeley; in the commotion that follows, nine students shout dirty words, go to jail and create the Filthy Speech Movement; to this day, it's confused with the Free Speech Movement, which is not the same at all.
□ After Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County directs an attack on civil rights marchers in Selma, Ala., Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and Martin Luther King Jr. organize a march of 3,200 to Montgomery, joined there by 25,000 others. Scores of UC students join the demonstrations. In the aftermath, Detroit housewife Viola Liuzzo is killed. But the march and prime time TV coverage inspire passage of the voting protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
□ Bob Dylan writes "Ballad of a Thin Man:" Something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? And at the Newport Folk Festival, he switches from his folk guitar to an electric guitar, drawing boos and cheers in equal measure.
□ The FSM formally goes out of business, having accomplished its goals. By year's end, the judge gives sentences of up to 120 days in jail to the Sproul Hall sit-in defendants. A legislative committee has blamed UC President Clark Kerr for the tolerance that gave birth to the FSM; its leaders, ironically, consider Kerr public enemy No. 1.
□ Looting and rioting in the Watts district of Los Angeles leads to 34 deaths and 4,000 arrests and leaves much of the community in ashes. The police chief blames civil rights workers, the mayor blames communists. Almost everyone else blames the mayor and the police chief.
□ Roger Heyns, a psychology professor, succeeds Martin Meyerson as chancellor of the Berkeley campus. UC regents decentralize the system, giving chancellors greater authority.
□ VDC demonstrators try to stop troop trains in Berkeley; in the fall, two VDC marches to Oakland are turned back at the Berkeley city limits; a third march is allowed to proceed under court order to a park.
1966
□ "Black power," voiced by SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael during the James Meredith march through Mississippi, begins to supplant the rhetoric of non-violence. By year's end, a Black Power Conference is held at UC-Berkeley with Carmichael and others as speakers; one result is another wave of criticism from those who say the university has become politicized.□ UC·Berkeley is rated the nation's "best-balanced distinguished university" by the American Council on Education, but at home an Academic Senate committee headed by Charles Muscatine issues a report that recommends educational reforms.
□ Ronald Reagan, stressing the Berkeley sit-ins in his campaign, defeats incumbent Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown while the same voters approve a $230 million package of construction bonds for higher education
The research and the researchers
Researcher Jacqueline Frost contributed to these stories.
Assisting with consultation and data preparation were Dr. Richard Deleon, director of the San Francisco State University Public Research Institute, and Ed Emerson, a graduate student.
This survey is based on a random sample from the FSM arrest list. Most figures come from a final group of 49; in some cases the base number is larger.
The potential sampling error is plus or minus 16 "at the 95 percent confidence level." This would indicate that it is reasonable to draw some basic inferences.
The "USA" comparison group, sharing similar age, race and education with the FSM sample, is a "selected subset" of 131 respondents from a 1980 study by the Center for Policy Studies at the University of Michigan.
San Francisco Examiner
December 12, 1984
'Biggest convulsion in history of education'
Agents of ChangeBy Lynn Ludlow and George Frost
Examiner staff writers
Fourth of six partsThe 20th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement holds particular meaning for Michael Reid Smith, an amiable man whose life today is engulfed by the same issue.
"It was the most educational experience," he said, "that I ever had."
His most memorable lecture came Dec. 2, 1964, when philosophy student Mario Savio articulated the fury of thousands of students at the University of California at Berkeley.
"There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even' passively take part," Savio said.
"And you've got to put your bodies on the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus —and you've got to make it stop!"
The jailing of 783 demonstrators—including Smith—became the Fort Sumter of an insurrection nourished by magic of television and broadcast to campuses everywhere.
Smith said the arresting officers waited until he was inside the elevator, then beat him,
"They roughed me up," he said, "They bent my fingers back."
Nathan Glazer, a sociologist who left the troubled campus for a job at
—See Page A6, col. 1
FSM's love-hate relationship with the UC 'factory'
—From Page Al
Harvard, described the Sixties rebellion as "the biggest convulsion in the history of American higher education."
But the relationship between the university and its angriest students was far too complex to end in divorce. After 20 years:
• Of a random sample of FSM veterans interviewed for an Examiner survey, more than one in three (36 percent) is involved today in education—mostly on the college level. One in seven is a university professor.
• University records and follow-up interviews with the survey group suggest that three of four arrested at Sproul Hall earned bachelor's degrees. More than one in three holds a graduate degree
• Like 7 percent of the sample group, Savio has returned to school. He is a graduate student in physics at San Francisco State University.
• In this section of the survey, the sample group of 74 individuals included five law degrees, one M.D. and a dozen men and women with Ph.D.s in everything from Elizabethan literature to the biophysics of yeast.
Smith himself is no exception to the love-hate relationship between SM alumni and the machinery of higher education.
For 10 years, this veteran of many a '60s protest has been the UC chancellor's official legal counsel.
***
Richard DeLeon was watching on Oct. 2, 1964, as UC campus police drove a .squad car into Sproul Plaza to pick up Jack Weinberg, who was in hand· cuffs for the crime of political advocacy on the campus.
Somebody—I don’t know who— yelled, 'Sit down in front of the car, said DeLeon. "I was one of the first.
Others in the protest included Kay Lawson, who arose from her sit-down to go to work that day.
"That night, the frat boys showed up and threw eggs at us."
Twenty years later, Lawson and DeLeon work together at San Francisco State University, running the "Practical Politics" program that leads not to jail but to a master's degree.
About 20 students in the graduate program organize off-campus campaigns, raise money for candidates and get out the vote. They are earnest, well-groomed and adept at the new tools of the trade: polls, phone banks, direct mail, computer targeting and sophisticated media packaging of candidates and causes.
"We don't just roll up our sleeves and drink beer," said DeLeon. "Well, sometimes.
DeLeon sees no reason why a campus should be insulated from politics. He has just founded the Institute for Public Research, established last summer to study the emerging political technologies and offer them to campaigns on a contract basis.
While most of DeLeon's students are oriented toward careers in the political mainstream, he said radicals could benefit in spite of what he calls "a noble savage approach to politics."
As an example of new techniques, he pulled out computer printouts for what he calls "multivariate regression analysis."
He said, "With this, we can plot how well Sister Boom Boom did in Precinct 3 in terms of the quality-of-life factor."
DeLeon and Lawson, while sympathetic to the FSM, didn't submit to arrest. In retrospect, however, the FSM incident was "the most electrifying moment of my life," he said.
"I still have that egg-splattered jacket," he said. "I never washed it."
The demonstrators of 1964 suggested then that "FSM" grew from a popular phrase of the keypunch era, "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate."
In a survey at the time, 80 percent of the UC students agreed with "factory" as an appropriate metaphor for their school. Two-thirds checked the blank that said "impersonal." One-third also marked "lonely."
But a paradox emerged as nine tenths answered "yes" to this question: "Taking everything into account, Cal is a good place to go to school."
Stimulated by the FSM, a faculty· ppointed committee headed by Charles Muscatine produced a 1966 report, "Education in Berkeley," that started several innovative programs.
About half the committee's recommendations were adopted, including a Board of Educational Development that was called a "high-speed bypass to experimental teaching efforts."
The bypass led to a head-on crash with the UC Board of Regents when the board approved a class in 1969 called Social Analysis 139X. Outside lecturers included Eldridge Cleaver, author of "Soul on Ice" and then a Black Panther Party leader accused of several crimes. (Today, Cleaver is back in Berkeley as a self-styled conservative in politics and religion.)
The UC Board of Regents stepped in, created new guidelines for guest lecturers and denied credit for 139X. The Academic Senate lost a court fight. Sit-ins led to the arrests of 172 people, but nothing changed. The board is now an advisory council.
A university spokesman said, "Student-initiated courses died out as a popular phenomenon after the Cleaver controversy. Students became increasingly disenchanted with the concept because of the lack of clear course objectives generally found in such courses."
***
Twenty years after the Sproul Hall sit-in, former UC President Clark Kerr spoke with a certain satisfaction in his voice. He reviewed the years since Gov. Ronald Reagan fired him and Savio said, "Good riddance."
"Looking back, the episode had remarkably few impacts on the campuses," said Kerr, who later headed the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.
Neil Smelser, a sociology professor who recently completed two years as president of the Academic Senate, wouldn't agree.
"Most of the activism just died out and went to the winds," he said, "but students are now much more involved in the governance of the university."
Students now sit on administrative and faculty committees, such as educational policy and academic freedom. It's a major responsibility.
Any lingering negative effects of the FSM or the backlash certainly aren't reflected in enrollment at Berkeley, which dipped in the mid' 60s but reached a record of 31,008 this fall (compared to 27,431 in 1964-65).
The university's graduate school has again been rated best in the nation by the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils. UC leads the nation in Guggenheim Fellows and ranks only behind Harvard in the number of faculty elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The faculty includes 11 winners of the Nobel Prize.
Smelser continued, "It became a more politically conscious institution. Feelings are better around the campus, but nobody forgets the bleak days."
Teaching wasn't easy, he said, from the FSM through the decade.
"There was a certain thread of anti-intellectualism, a certain amount of moral blackmail from students who would put pressure on you to make certain kinds of statements.
"I don't miss that kind of pressure from the activists, but then my role was to calm them down, introduce a little reflection in their lives. Nowadays, my mission is changed. It has to do with stirring up students who have adopted a self-oriented career approach to their lives, which also has its own brand of anti-intellectualism."
***
"It looks like the '50s," said Michael Shub, 41.
As a group, veterans of the FSM remain deeply interested in the na· ture and goals of university education, "Kids are serious," said Shub. "In the '50s, we could be more optimistic. We could risk more."
Now a mathematics professor at City College of New York, Shub was responding to the part of The Examiner's survey that inquired about a surge of interest in business careers among today's students.
Only a few (14 percent) approved of this trend. More (30 percent) called it a sign of hard times. The largest group (43 percent) was dismayed.
"It speaks to the death of ideology," said the Rev. Dennis Peacocke, an evangelist in Belmont. "They are looking out for No. 1."
Others in the survey sample:
Shelagh Hickey Covington, a Chicagoan active in philanthropic foundations: "It's not only a personal loss. It's a loss for society. And it's very boring."
Daniel Keig, a real estate investor in Berkeley: "It's an interesting swing of the pendulum. I'm in favor of it. Many Sixties people work for me, but half the time they don't even show up. These kids are more serious."
Patricia Eliet, professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills: "There was abundance back then. People could take a year off and not worry about it. There is more panic now. These people are saying, 'OK, you said I would get a job; now prepare me for it.'"
Stephen Leonard, assistant attorney general, Massachusetts: "They don't care about anything beyond themselves. At least in the Sixties we could say we did. I think it stinks."
***
Michael Smith, by now an authority on the political rights of students, looked back 20 years to the Sproul Hall sit-in and said it played an important role in the development of campus activism.
"At Berkeley, it led to a real awareness of student rights and student power," he said.
Smith, who grew up in Pacific Palisades in a family sympathetic to leftist causes, said he decided to study at
—See next page
Many radicals found careers in education
—From preceding page
Berkeley after the San Francisco City Hall disturbance of 1960 when demonstrators against the House Un-American Activities Committee were hosed down the steps and arrested.
Involved then in the W.E.B. DuBois Club, a bulwark of what was called the Old Left, Smith was already a veteran activist before the FSM. He took part in sit-ins in San Francisco's Sheraton Palace Hotel and Mel's Drive-In before leaving for Freedom Summer voter drives in Mississippi.
"I saw the FSM as a direct link to student rights," he said.
After the Peace Corps and law school, he was appointed to handle civil rights cases involving American Indians as an assistant general counsel with the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
It's been a decade or more since he took part in a demonstration, when he was tear-gassed in front of the U.S. Justice Department.
"There are no groups or issues that move me like the civil rights issues and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s," he said.
In the meantime, the Movement faded away.
"People got burned out, to some extent, and to some extent the issue went away when the war ended."
Ten years after Sproul Hall, he returned to the machine, putting himself behind its gears and wheels and levers. His perspective had changed.
"I shared with other activists a disrespect for people like Kerr. 1 tended to view all campus administrators as liars. Today I take a different view."
Smith has dropped out of activism.
"There are no more pure radicals anymore," he said. "At least, I don't know any."
In his job, he explains the rights of protest demonstrators to the police who may have to haul them off to jail. And he informs representatives of protest groups about the university rules and regulations.
"Co-opted? I don't see it that way. One underlying notion of the FSM was that the administration doesn't have sensitivity to students. If I had been in my present job back then, I might have advised the chancellor differently. Who knows? I don't."
STUDY OR ACTIVISM?
In October 1964, a sampling of the general student body at UC Berkeley was asked to react to a statement associated with the Joe College prototype:
"Students who participate in off-campus political demonstrations, picketing, etc., would be better advised to spend their time studying or in college activities."
FSM veterans were asked the same question this year.
(figures in percent)Comparison..................1984…….1964
Strongly agree ............… 8……….. 6
Mildly 8gree .................. 5………. 27
Mildly disagree ............ 21 ………47
Strong disagree ............ 66……… 20Remarks:
Since the late '70s, I have had such a politically apathetic group of students. It goes beyond that; they are politically ignorant. It would make them more interesting and more aware to get involved."
—Patricia Eliet, English professor"I think students are citizens as much as anyone else. Everyone has the right and responsibility to make their views known not only at the ballot box—but on the streets."
—Donna Watson, electrician"There is no better time to get involved, when you don't have the burdens of a family, when your energy is high..."
—William J. Knight, mathematics professor"They are not mutually exclusive. During the FSM we didn't let our studies drop. There is time to study and if one chooses to be a social activist, fine. Actually, it may improve one's education to do both."
—Kenneth Barter, alcohol education counselor"That is a meaningless statement. Sure, they can study but they can picket, too. It's like saying students can either make love or study. One has nothing to do with the other. Both are valuable."
—Michael Shub, mathematics professorBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT
(figures in percent)Non·students...................... 6
Did not graduate .............. 19
Bachelor's degree ............. 37
Master's degree ................ 16
Doctoral degree ................ 16
law degree .......................... 5
Medical degree ................... 1Comparison ……… FSM….. USA
No degree ................. 25......... 44
Bachelor's degree ….. 20......... 36
Advanced degree ….. 65......... 20
Note: These figures show the highest degree obtained by FSM activists compared with a sample group of the same age who also attended college.Remarks:
"Berkeley was a piece of cake, easier than high school."
—Marvin Tener, computer consultant"I dropped out to go into business with a friend. Political research in San Francisco. More interesting than school."
—Mark Switzer, environmentalist"I never got so excited about political science after that. I became more interested in doing things."
—Rodney Mullen, drug-alcohol program administratorBUSINESS EDUCATION
What do you think of emphasis on business in today's college generation?
(figures in percent)Think it's good .............. 14
Think it's bad ................ 43
A sign of the times ........ 30
Don't care ....................... 9
Not sure .......................... 4Remarks:
"It is wishful thinking on the part of the powers-that-be that students today don't care."
—David Bacon, union organizer"Per se it doesn't perturb me, but I'm concerned with what they do with their degrees. There is plenty of need for managers who believe in corporate responsibility."
—Michael Cortes, graduate student"It is a fact of life. I try not to make moral judgments. If it means they are less idealistic, these things go in cycles…."
—William Knight, mathematicianBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
Tomorrow: Beyond activism
Some standout events in 3 tumultuous years
CALENDAR OF CHANGE
A Selective Chronology1967
□ Ronald Reagan, announcing he will "cut, squeeze and trim" state government, takes office as governor of California. In what became a bitter, longrunning dispute, University of California regents are told to scale back budgets and introduce tuition. The regents vote 14-8 to fire UC President Clark Kerr.
□ A human be-in at Golden Gate Park marks the dawning of flower-child culture. Twenty-thousand people groove to the Jefferson Airplane and hear Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin. The publicity draws thousands of young people to Haight-Ashbury for a "Summer of Love."
□ Race riots in Newark, Detroit and Cambridge, Md., leave dozens dead, thousands injured. The Kerner Commission report on the civil disorders concludes: "We are moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."
□ Nearly 10,000 anti-war protesters, chanting "Hell no, nobody goes," clash with police in downtown Oakland during "Stop the Draft Week." Many are injured by the first extensive use of Mace.
□ Black Panther leader Huey Newton is arrested in the shooting death of an Oakland police officer.
□ North Vietnam launches the Tet offensive. More than 400 Americans are killed in the first week.
1968
□ The battle between Reagan and UC heats up when the governor trims UC's budget request from $311 million to $280 million.
□ President Lyndon Johnson tells the nation that he will not seek re-election.
□ Lieutenant William Calley leads an attack on the South Vietnamese village of My Lai, but the public will not learn of it for more than a year.
□ Student riots sweep through Europe. Twenty-three campuses in England have serious incidents. In France, a general strike paralyzes the government of Charles de Gaulle, who dissolves the National Assembly. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a student leader, says, "A whole generation is rising." In Berkeley, police institute a citywide curfew after four days of rioting by supporters of the French students.
□ The day after the Rev. Martin Luther King is murdered in Memphis, riots paralyze more than 100 cities. Police arrest 20,000. Thirty-nine persons die. Historian Theodore White would say, "The event was almost too large to grasp politically."
□ Robert F. Kennedy is fatally shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. Sirhan B. Sirhan is arrested. Hundreds of thousands of mourners line the train route from New York to Arlington Cemetery.
□ Chicago police stage what the Commission on Violence later calls a "police riot"—on national TV. Inside the Democratic National Convention hall, the Democrats nominate Hubert Humphrey for president. In Berkeley, several thousand demonstrators react by destroying $400,000 of UC Berkeley properly in 10 days of riots.
□ Richard Milhouse Nixon wins the presidency with 43 percent of the vote. Eldridge Cleaver of the Peace and Freedom Party receives 200,000 votes.
1969
□ In Bethel, N.Y., the Woodstock Festival draws more than 300,000 rock fans.
□ The People's Park dispute in Berkeley turns into a nightmare when a march of 6,000 students and others is blocked by peace officers. One bystander is blinded; an onlooker is killed. The National Guard takes over. The UC campus is dusted with tear gas.
□ A survey of high schools for the year shows 675 protests, mostly involving "student power." Protests are reported on 232 university campuses in the first six months.
□ SDS alliance shatters at the annual meeting, where nihilistic elements like the Crazies compete with the Revolutionary Union, the Klonsky-Coleman group, the Action-Faction and the Mad Dogs. When Progressive Labor wins the platform fight, others walk out and form the Revolutionary Youth Movement, which then splits acrimoniously into RYM-II and the Weathermen.
□ Charles Manson and his "family" are indicted in connection with the murders of actress Sharon Tate and her unborn child.
□ Most of the crowd is oblivious, but the stabbing death of a young man at Altamont Speedway during a Rolling Stones concert is later described as the death knell of the flower culture.
Players and bystanders in the UC revolution
By George Frost
Examiner staff writerThe year was 1964. The Stanford game was a 21-8 bust. Vickie Backeberg, a 20-year-old Alpha Delta Pi from Orange County, reigned as Big Game Queen over a campus that was coming apart.
She held fast.
"I loved the campus, the people," she said. "Even now, when I visit Berkeley, I get a fond feeling."
She received a degree in social science in 1965, worked in a placement center and considered a teaching career. Instead, she married R. Lewis Van Blois, an Oakland attorney. They moved to suburban Lafayette and settled down on Happy Valley Road.
"Being on the campus then was educational. I was very interested in what was going on," she said. "I didn't necessarily approve of all the revolutionary measures the students took to make their views known."
Today she and her husband travel extensively. They seldom miss a Cal game. They ski often and play tennis on their own backyard court. They have three children involved in sports. She has been active in Junior League. She is a registered Republican.
She said she hopes her children will attend UC Berkeley.
"I survived it well," she said. "I maintained my own world within the other world of the campus."
A photograph survives from 1964. She cradles her roses with a modest, untroubled smile.
"If I could repeat any time in my life, that would be it," she said. "I don't mean just the Oski Doll and frat I parties. I would do everything over again."
She is just one whose life on campus during the turbulent '60s, encompassing the Free Speech Movement but not part of it, was touched by it. Others are remembered for parts they played then and since:
□ CRAIG MORTON, who was Cal's senior quarterback in 1964, led the Golden Bears to their fourth straight Big Game loss. Morton became an issue when FSM activists complained that they, too, should be allowed to complete missed classes the next semester—just as the star quarterback was allowed to do. Named an All-American, he signed with "America's team," the Dallas Cowboys. Married, with three children, he retired from football last year. He now owns a restaurant in Denver.
□ KATHERINE TOWLE, who set the administrative gears of the political ban clanking into motion, was dean of students. (She served in the Marine Corps during and after World War II, eventually as boss of all women Marines.) Although she didn't originate the policy, she issued a new decree that banned activism for the first time from the sidewalk strip at Bancroft and Telegraph, a zone previously thought to be city property. Towle, now an invalid in her Pacific Grove home, watched a TV show about the FSM recently and "took an interest in it," according to her private nurse.
□ ALEX SHERRIFFS, Berkeley vice-chancellor, had recommended the Towle decree. The fallout would eventually cost him his job, although he later became a top administrator of the California State University system in Long Beach. He is now retired, a professor emeritus of psychology.
□ FRANK WOODWARD, then the campus police chief, cited five students Sept. 30 for violating campus political rules under the Towle decree. When a campus police car was driven into the plaza for the arrest of former student Jack Weinberg, it was surrounded by demonstrators for more than a day. Woodward presided over the gathering of hundreds of police officers, who were later dispersed after UC authorities agreed to release Weinberg. Woodward, who retired soon after the FSM, is dead.
□ IRA HEYMAN, then a law professor, was named chairman of a special Academic Senate committee that investigated the suspensions of eight UC students after the Oct. 2 police car incident. In what amounted to stinging criticism of the chancellor, his committee said the suspended students were singled out arbitrarily, "almost as hostages." Heyman is now the chancellor.
□ EDWARD STRONG, the silverhaired, 6-foot, 4-inch philosophy professor and Berkeley chancellor, stood before the Sproul Hall demonstrators the night of Dec. 3 and shouted into a bullhorn, "Now, go. Get." The demonstrators stayed. After months of stress, culminated by the sit-ins and the classroom boycott that followed, Strong fell ill. Later he was removed from the chancellorship by the UC, regents. "It became evident he was just too weary to continue on," Clark Kerr said later. Strong won't comment. "I don't believe in second-guessing," he said recently. "I don't regret the positions I took. It turned out very quickly that the leadership of the FSM didn't want any settlement." Strong, now 83, lives in Berkeley. His main interest is the International Journal of the History of Philosophy.
□ LUDWIG VON SCHWARENBERG, a German short hair, spent so much time at Sproul Hall Plaza in FSM days that the regents, in a moment of levity, named the fountain for him. When his owner moved to Alameda, so did the favorite dog of the FSM.
□ ROBERT SCALAPINO was chairman of all the department chairmen on Dec. 7 when, after the arrests, he presented a compromise scheme in behalf of the university's 57 academic departments. Today he is the founder and director of the UC Institute of International Studies.
□ CHARLES POWELL, the student body president who denounced the FSM for law-breaking tactics, later joined Rev. Billy Graham's Campus Crusade for Christ. Today he is a representative of an evangelistic foundation, living in Strasbourg, France.
□ CLARK KERR, president of UC, became directly involved on Dec. 7, when the Scalapino proposal was delivered at a convocation in the Hearst Greek Theater. Following Kerr's address, Savio approached the microphone—and was collared and dragged off stage by campus police. Kerr ordered him released. Savio then returned to the mike and politely announced an upcoming rally. Two days later, the faculty voted 824 to 115 to guarantee free political speech on campus. Kerr, who became to the FSM a despised symbol of liberal hypocrisy, was fired in 1966 after Reagan won the governorship and a majority on the Board of Regents. After years with the Carnegie Institute of Higher Education, Kerr still lives in the EI Cerrito hills.
□ GOV. EDMUND G. "PAT" BROWN, who agreed to go ahead with mass arrests in Sproul Hall, called the FSM action "anarchy" and pledged that the "rule of law must be honored in California." Brown nonetheless lost his 1966 re-election bid to Reagan, who argued that his opponent had been soft on Watts rioters, welfare cheaters and, of course, campus radicals.
□ MARTIN MEYERSON, dean of the College of Environmental Design when chosen to succeed Strong, later served as president of State University of New York at Buffalo and then the University of Pennsylvania. He retired two years ago.
□ EDWARD CARTER, then president of the UC Board of Regents, took part in the board's decision to overrule Strong and eliminate all restrictions on campus political activity except reasonable rules for "time, place and manner." Today he is the only regent from that time to continue serving on the board.
□ RUPERT CRITTENDEN, the Alameda County Municipal Court judge who delivered stern lectures and still sentences to platoons of FSM demonstrators during the trials and hearings in the spring of 1965, died in 1966.
□ MALCOLM BURNSTEIN, chief defense lawyer for the FSM, is now in private practice in San Francisco.
□ DAVID DUTTON, assistant district attorney for Alameda County along with Ed Meese and Lowell Jensen, prosecuted the Sproul Hall protestors. Recalling the sit-in, he said, "There is no excuse for breaking the law. But it's been so long I've forgotten almost all of it." Today Meese is a key adviser to President Ronald Reagan. Jensen, who later became the Alameda County district attorney, is the Reagan administration's chief assistant attorney general for criminal matters. Dutton recently retired after 36 years in the district attorney's office.
□ DON MULFORD, 69, the conservative Piedmont state legislator who as caucus chairman engineered Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial victory, later authored a law which allowed college officials to exclude and arrest non-students on campuses. At the time of the arrests, his comment was, "No quarter." Redistricted out of his seat in 1970, he is now the unpaid chief of protocol for the state of California and chairman of the state Alcohol Beverages Appeal Board. Mulford said he'd worked for Ronald Reagan in every campaign since 1966. Was the FSM a big campaign issue? "That was a long time ago and I've been in a lot of campaigns," he said. "Reagan must have done something right; now he is the president."
□ RONALD REAGAN, in the midst of his 1966 campaign for the governorship of California, wrote to Atlantic magazine that, "Something is wrong at Berkeley, and strong, concerned leadership is needed to set it right. Obviously, that leadership is not now being provided."
□ SARA DAVIDSON, who attended Berkeley just prior to the FSM and worked for the Daily Cal, is the author of "Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties," a fictional account of the experiences she shared with two roommates in a UC Berkeley sorority. In her conclusion, she writes: "We had predicted that the center could not hold but it had, and now we were in pieces.…" Davidson, whose latest novel is "Friends of the Opposite Sex," lives in New York.
The research and the researchers
Researcher Jacqueline Frost contributed to these stories.
Assisting with consultation and data preparation were Dr. Richard Deleon, director of the San Francisco State University Public Research Institute, and Ed Emerson, a graduate student.
This survey is based on a random sample from the FSM arrest list. Most figures come from a final group of 49; in some cases the base number is larger.
The potential sampling error is plus or minus 16 "at the 95 percent confidence level." This would indicate it is reasonable to draw some basic inferences.
The "USA" comparison group, sharing similar age, race and education with the FSM sample, is a "selected subset" of 131 respondents from a 1980 study by the Center for Policy Studies at the University of Michigan.
San Francisco Examiner
December 13, 1984
Those who still look for ways to escape
Agents of ChangeBy Lynn Ludlow and George Frost
Examiner staff writers
Fifth of six partsThere is just the stillness, the dark and the faint hiss of the dispatcher's voice over the radio.
The cab driver grimaces. His back, as usual, hurts like hell.
Gripping the wheel, Joe Botkin peers into the dark streets of Berkeley. His hands are numb. As he says later, they seem less his own than mechanical assemblages which, like the cab, are owned by someone else.
And in the back of his mind something shouts: "You are nothing."
Botkin said he's endured too many such nights in recent years.
"You know, I always thought whatever I was doing was temporary," he said. "I didn't want to get trapped in a middle-class existence. In five or ten years I probably can't escape."
Traps and escapes often emerge ill conversation with alumni of the Free Speech Movement who marched with Botkin into history 20 years ago at the University of California. General euphoria followed victory, but most chose not to remain political activists.
"The FSM was something like a pilgrimage," said Elin Calvin, another graduate of the FSM who stayed in
—See Page A10, col. 1
Fate hasn’t been kind to many veterans of FSM
Alienation is still a reality
—From Page Al
Berkeley. "We all felt together. It was a ship of fools, on a holy quest, bound for a new land."
Botkin was one passenger who missed the boat.
"I don't feel certain about anything," he said. "I have a lot of existential anxiety."
A dropout from UC after the Sproul Hall incident, Botkin said he became disillusioned with political activism.
Now 41, Botkin is part of a representative sample of FSM alumni chosen at random for an Examiner survey. It asks, in effect, what they think happened to their generation.
The answers suggest that many former activists abandoned politics in search of other answers.
John Searle, a UC faculty sympathizer, said, "For some, it was the purest, most moral period in their lives."
He added: "It reminds me of Tom Buchanan in 'The Great Gatsby.' Nothing ever reached the quality and purity of playing in that game, Princeton against Yale."
The survey group includes Lee Goldblatt Nixon, a former teacher who lives in San Rafael.
"There is a dialectic between political processes and events, so that you can't talk revolution when it's not occurring," she said. "We really do live in an era of alienation."
Berkeley writer Michael Rossman, also arrested in the FSM, has written, "Those who stand at the edge of chaos are most exposed to dizzmess."
***
"You have to be a little bit alienated to be a radical to begin with," said Botkin.
"Many were just acting out, projecting their inner turmoil on the world and seeing it as a private drama. Politics becomes a veneer.
"You become the persona, making a romantic image of yourself, 'a radical'"
At age 21, he said, he was an ardent socialist who believed that the revolution was just a few years off.
"Change was in the air," he recalled. "There was a feeling of movement. But nothing came of it."
He said he later became a hermit, working nights and drifting away from friends. And today, he said, "I am selfishly involved in my own life. I don't see anything outside of myself that I can work for."
No more hiding, he said.
"I am only now re-emerging and taking my life in my hands," he said. "Waking up with gray hairs; that is a little scary. For only so long is one a youth with wide-open possibilities."
***
Others in the survey group say they, too, are re-emerging.
Julie Wellings, a jeweller in Ojai, faces a strange new world. She is experiencing culture shock, she said, after 10 years of Hindu study and meditation in India.
"Cars, the music, politics—it's all so different," she said. "I dropped out of mainstream U.S.A. It turned me inward to search for reality on a different level."
Wellings said she is now involved in a "committed relationship" with another woman and is learning about motherhood by helping to raise the woman's child. Beyond mothering, and "just getting by financially," she said she is active in gay rights and anti-nuclear groups.
In the search for FSM alumni after 20 years, 26 percent couldn't be located.
In San Bernardino, a father said with rancor, "I haven't heard from him in a long time. He's been on the road for years."
He blamed the FSM for his son's academic and professional failures.
"That was a terrible thing. It ruined my kid. It ruined a lot of kids," he said. "He was a good kid. He had lots of friends and he helped people."
According to the father, the young activist dropped out of Berkeley just a year shy of graduation, traveled for a few years and then took up wood· working. He has worked sporadically ever since, drifting.
"Why dig up the past?" his father asked. "It tore me up and it still tears me up."
For others in the FSM survey, the past is best buried and forgotten.
A thin, graying woman stood outside the door of her ramshackle Berkeley home and refused to discuss her life since the Sproul Hall sit-in.
After shooing away her children, she explained, "My circumstances make it too easy to identify me. Please don't come here again."
***
One former FSM activist confided that he has dealt cocaine. Another said she avoids all drugs because, as she puts it, "I am so drug sensitive that I get high on aspirin."
Almost two-thirds of the FSM alumni sample said they had tried marijuana, although most added that they stopped years ago.
"I quit when I started meditating," said Calvin.
Mark Switzer, environmentalist in Inverness: "Heavily, at one time."
More than half (55 percent) have tried LSD.
Marvin Tener, computer consultant, Philadelphia: "I did acid. It was a tool for growth. Then at some point in the early '70s I decided it didn't make sense any more."
***
"I grew up a lot slower than I thought possible," said David Wald, who has no nostalgia for the '60s.
"The Movement was on several levels," he said. "We'd all drop acid, or drop out of school or abolish war. I suppose some people are still into that."
Today, married again, father of a 2-year-old child, he builds cabinets and hopes for a better life.
Wald, like Calvin, is the child of a famous scientist. His father, Harvard biologist George Wald, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, remains an activist in social and political causes. His son was slightly sardonic.
"I am going to get completely straight," he said. "And enormously successful. And make a lot of money. And have a life that is very enviable."
He paused.
"I haven't worked out all the details yet."
***
Dana Kramer-Rolls. 44, now an office worker at UC-Berkeley, dwells simultaneously in the past and future.
She is the first woman to wear the armor of a knight in the medieval war games of the Society of Creative Allachronism.
She also is writing a science fiction book that relates evolution to social development.
"Science fiction allows me to address the future," she said. "But I'm still an old missionary and want to change the world."
She calls herself a futurist writer but very much in the present when she shops at the grocery store. "I'm still 16 in my head," she said. "What do I do when I grow up?"
***
Rossman didn't like the 1970s.
"The dominant organizing form in this decade appears to be the sheep herd." he wrote.
"In every valley I hear the tinkling bells of their leaders, see those patriarchal rams butting heads, watch them leading their followers toward glorious pastures."
***
"The later '60s, walking around with 900,000 other people at some protest, lacked depth," said Calvin.
She is a single parent and self-employed pastry chef who has stepped back into the mainstream after years of domestic seclusion.
"It was dehumanizing. People turned inward to find the answers."
She taught transcendental meditation for years, then dropped out when that movement "went mainstream."
She said, "I want to get back into the real world."
Calvin, separated from her husband for "many years now," said the protest movement ended because "everybody went home and had babies."
She added, "That is what I did. I went to my house and stayed there for 10 years."
She is the daughter of Melvin Calvin, a longtime UC professor who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1961. She is back on the campus as a master's candidate in clinical psychology, working on a study of society's outcasts, the street people.
"I want to learn the hidden rules of life out there, about panhandling, territory and the like," she said. "How do they eat? Where do they sleep? But I'm scared. I worry that their tragedies, their despair can't be remedied."
She said, "I am just beginning to come back to life."
***
For Joseph Botkin, disillusionment has brought self-knowledge, stoicism and hope.
"You can't change what happened. My regret was that I was not a more serious student. Driving a cab, I feel somewhat trapped. It's not just economic," he said. "After 10 years of working and being a mental vegetable, I want to learn about the world.
Botkin, who never obtained a degree, is back in school on a part-time basis.
"I just took a course in Mexican history and one in ecology," he said, "areas that I wouldn't have dreamed of in the '60s."
Although he does not consider himself a victim, Botkin said, "The Free Speech Movement diverted me from my studies. Education did not seem very important, or a career."
Botkin said he has little faith in the answers of religion or ideology.
"Ideology can be a substitute for facing your own problems," he said. "People submerge themselves in many ways. In business. Ideology. "They can be ways of hiding away."
As for activism, Botkin said that first he has to clean up his own act.
"The world doesn't need more immature radicals running around."
And during those nights when, driving cab, a familiar despair threatens to overcome him, he grips the wheel and hangs on. There is, he said, no alternative.
"It is just that I am that much closer to dying and I still haven't figured it all out."
Tomorrow: Nukes, punks and pasta
DRUGS
Regular or experimental use of LSD?
(figures in percent)Yes ............................ 61
No ............................. 39Remarks:
If I did the usual psychedelics. The music back then had a lot to do with it."
—Martha Platt Bergmann, gardener"There was a time when I took LSD and smoked grass. It was a lot of fun. As for LSD, it was too powerful to call it a recreational drug. We called it a trip for good reasons...."
—Randall Collins, writer-professorMARIJUANA
(figures in percent)
Yes ............................ 62
No ............................. 20
No answer ................. 18Remarks:
"Marijuana made me spend too much time alone. I was trying to reach out to people and the world."
—Kenneth Barter, alcohol education counselor"No. I don't do.any drugs. I tried grass and cocaine but I am not interested in them. My only two drugs are coffee and cigarettes.
—Patricia Eliet, English professor"I smoked a lot of grass."
—The Rev. Dennis PeacockeBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLES SINCE FSM
(figures in percent)Yes ............................ 38
No ............................. 62Remarks:
"No. There was a split between the hippies and the politicals. I smoked dope with the hippies but that was all."
—Mark Desmet, computer company owner"I have remained committed to the counterculture. But on the other hand, I’m not a doctrinaire anything. Not just a hippie or a radical or anything like that."
—Keith Simons, importer"No. I would have done a lot more bumming around except I got a draft deferment for law school."
—Stephen Leonard, asst. attorney general, MassachusettsBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
RELIGION
(figures in percent)
Yes ............................ 26
No ............................. 74Remarks:
"People believe in what you do, not in what you say. So I think there's a 'small' religious thing, honesty in relationships, being able to do something for your fellow human beings."
—Rodney Mullen, drug-alcohol educator"I have never taken part in the religious supermarket of the Bay Area."
—Jeremy Bruenn, biochemist"No. I have studied many religions, but I really feel that each contains a portion of the truth as well as man's egoistic ramblings."
—Helaine Grabowski McLainBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
Some 'got it,' some got Rolfed, but most steered clear of religion
By George Frost
Examiner staff writerDennis Peacocke said the shock transformed him 20 years ago in Berkeley from campus jock into political radical. For a time.
"The cops were so frightened," he said. "They were totally unequipped. Their fear and animosity were a revelation."
After the Free Speech Movement's occupation of Sproul Hall at the University of California, the former football player said, he felt like an outcast for the first time in his young life.
A more profound transformation came to Peacocke in San Francisco in 1967, the Summer of Love. It came as he contemplated blowing his brains out with a .35-caliber Magnum.
Jesus appeared in a vision, he said. He accepted Christ as his own personal savior; he was an outcast no longer.
Peacocke, now 41, is a minister in the "shepherding" movement. It demands total life commitment from members. He calls himself "an extreme activist" in the service of Christ.
FSM alumni took different paths in their continuing search for relevance or meaning.
Some studied Eastern philosophy, meditated, got Rolfed, "got it" with est, soaked in Esalen hot tubs, rubbed feet in sensitivity groups and, in a few cases, returned to the faith of their families.
***
Peacocke isn't typical of the FSM demonstrators chosen at random for this 20-years-later survey.
Asked if they had ever been involved in "religious commitments," a phrase interpreted to include everything from Zen readings to born-again conversions, only 26 percent answered yes.
This is not much evidence of a strong link between the FSM rebels and the variety of religious and philosophical opportunities that arose in the '70s.
Daniel Keig, real estate investor: "I did a lot of reading in Eastern religions and was involved in the Eureka School, an offshoot of Esalen, to study methods of enhancing consciousness."
Stephen Robman, a stage director, practices a "diluted form of Judaism —that's diluted, not deluded."
"I've done some stuff with personal growth, like est," said Donna Watson, an electrician in Berkeley. "I'm glad I did it. Recently I've done some body work at the Center for. Self Healing " Stephen Gabow, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University, said he meditated mornings for six months in 1968, but tired of staring at a wall and chanting.
Anyway, he said, "I've always wanted to orient myself to the outside world, not my own head."
Many agreed with Kenneth Barter, an alcohol education professional in Virginia.
"I think there might be a greater power out there," he chuckled. "But I doubt that the greater power takes much interest in me."
***
Randall Collins, the writer and sociologist in San Diego, recalled when, stoned on LSD, he found himself in the Temple of 1,000 Buddhas in Japan. "There were actually 1001 golden Buddhas there, all lined up in rows, gleaming," said Collins, a Buddhist for about five years.
"Believe me, those people squatting in caves in Tibet are not bored," he said. He laughed. "You had these great psychic visions to meditate on. Boddhisattvas, bright colors, it all had a certain significance."
***
Helaine Grabowski Mclain, a Colorado artist, ponders her involvement in the Free Speech Movement from a perspective not only of years, but of countless lifetimes.
"It was part of the natural pattern of my life, my own series of lives, my evolution," she said.
Mclain said she works for an Arizona woman, Page Bryant, who acts as a "channel" for a metaphysical entity called "Albion," who speaks through Bryant. She said she transcribes Bryant/Albion's revelations about this world and the coming "change."
"The world is a living entity and we are trying to prevent its destruction," she said. "That is our purpose, unlike
—See next page·
A11
Lives of most '60s radicals didn't go in religious direction
—From Page A10
politics, which divides nation from nation."
Meanwhile, McLain awaits her own spiritual awakening and a time when she won't have to put her shoes on each morning.
"It happens during initiatory stages, seven of them. During the first four·you have to be incarnate, but in the fifth you have a choice," she said. "I think I'm on the threshold of my first initiation."
Such an initiation is not always accompanied by a brass band.
"No big voice says, 'Congratulations, you did it.'"
She said, "The soul stays with you for many lifetimes until you reach a stage when you don't want to put your feet on earth again."
***
Keith Simons, an importer, said he tried gestalt therapy, psychodrama and biofeedback training. "I don't believe in cults," he said, "I am anti-cult and anti-guru, per se."
***
Peacocke had attended Cal on a football scholarship but suffered a disabling injury on the field.
He was 21 when he journeyed from the sunlit steps of Sproul Hall through a cultural looking-glass of radical politics, LSD and Eastern philosophy.
"I was a Zen Buddhist, took drugs—the whole shot," he said, "It was a strange thing. If anybody had told me then I'd be a Christer, I'd say they were crazy."
Peacocke said he still embraces the FSM legacy of political activism. It taught him, he said, that the church should lead the way.
Unlike the FSM, the shepherding movement is authoritarian.
Peacocke said, "We do not believe that the Kingdom of God is a democracy."
As president of the Christian Covenant Fellowship based in the Bay Area, he oversees dozens of shepherds, who in turn oversee those lower in the movement's pyramid.
"The church missed a golden opportunity to take a truly Christian posture and challenge people to change," he said. "Today, I want the church in the vanguard, not the tail."
He has helped set up "alternatives-to- abortion" counseling clinics I throughout the Bay Area. He worries about what he calls the deterioration of the family.
As for his fellow FSMers, Peacocke said he does not question their sincerity. But he disputes what he calls the premise of socialism, that the individual is largely produced by economic, social and political relations of the time.
"The great battle is about the two opposing views of man," he said. "Is man a product of human engineering? Or of God?"
Real change, he said, begins with souls, not social institutions. "Jesus said it best," said Peacocke, the man twice transformed into radical activism.
"Unless you are born again you can't really change anything."
The research and the researchers
Researcher Jacqueline Frost contributed to these stories.
Assisting with consultation and data preparation were Dr. Richard Deleon, director of the San Francisco State University Public Research Institute, and Ed Emerson, a graduate student.
This survey is based on a random sample from the FSM arrest list. Most figures come from a final group of 49; in some cases the base number is larger.
The potential sampling error is plus or minus 16 "at the 95 percent confidence level." This would indicate it is reasonable to draw some basic inferences.
The "USA" comparison group, sharing similar age, race and education with the FSM sample, is a "selected subset" of 131 respondents from a 1980 study by the Center for Policy Studies at the University of Michigan.
San Francisco Examiner
December 14, 1984
Nuclear war fears unite former FSM activists
Agents of ChangeBy Lynn Ludlow and George Frost
Examiner staff writers
Last of six partsGuiltily they admit nowadays to a fondness for fresh pasta. A spiked haircut may inspire some to murmur, "Nihilism!" But most agree on the major issue of their day.
Veterans of the Free Speech Movement said In an Examiner survey that the biggest of all their concerns today is the threat of nuclear destruction.
Now a biology professor at New Mexico State University. Joseph LaPointe was among the 783 demonstrators arrested 20 years ago when the FSM occupied Sproul Hall at the University of California in Berkeley.
He's a grandfather now.
"There's nothing a hell of a lot more important," he said, ''than that bomb."
In 1964, many said, their own parents were upset when the Silent Generation came to a noisy end. In 1984, they worry about their own kids. But not for the same reason.
"My son, sure, I'd like to get him involved in something like the FSM, although I should probably bite my tongue," said Marvin Tener, 42, a computer consultant in Philadelphia. "But most activism now is on the right."
FSM alumni are also disturbed because the restaurants of Berkeley get far more attention than the politics of dissent or the movement to bring change to American society.
"It seems only the shallower aspects survived," said Stephen Leonard, 40, assistant attorney general in Massachusetts. "Now you have these young hedonists who voted for Ronald Reagan. The social changes were more enduring than the political."
The survey suggests the political
—See Page A12, col. 1
Protesters now: Haute cuisine feeds some; ideals .nourish others
—From Page Al
perspective of most FSM alumni falls between liberal democrats and democratic socialists. Only a few call themselves radicals or revolutionaries.
But they became an unusually independent bunch, as illustrated by a decision that faced Richard Adelman, now 4l, when he was let go as a teacher of psychology and sociology in a San Diego junior college.
Adelman, who had played his conga drums during the police car incident 20 years ago, never much liked classrooms anyway. So he came back, teaching people to play the conga drums Cuba style, for fun and therapy.
"It's much more satisfying," he said
He makes $14,000 a year, but he doesn't call anyone boss.
Neither does another FSM alumni in the sample, Daniel Keig, 50.
"I've got a real estate empire," he said.,
He makes more than $100,000 a year after taxes, he said. And he became a Republican. Nobody ever said the FSM' would produce people who would turn out the same. They don't even stay in touch.
And yet, most of them said they would do it again.
Elizabeth Blum, an occupational therapist in Vermont, called for a reprise of the '60s.
"Out of the hot tubs," she said, "and into the streets!"
Others had reservations.
"I have a somewhat higher calling now," said Michael Cortes, 42, who is back in graduate school at UC. "I have to be home to fix dinner and put the kids to bed, but sure, given the same circumstances, sure. I wouldn't miss it for the world."
***
Robert Hirschfeld, who became an actor, remembers the sit-in as if it were improvisational drama.
"The whole atmosphere was very charged, the kind of feeling you could expect to find—in kind if not in greater, degree—in such situations as the French Revolution," he said.
"Then you realized you're part of something spontaneous which began to have, a life of its own, exceeding whatever kind of organization went into it."
Then a, student in dramatic arts, Hirschfeld said, "If they had just held off arresting people for as much as one day they would probably have shrunk our number by half. We were tired. It was a kind of an adventure, but it was very unpleasant."
It was his first and last arrest.
His jailers weren't all that mean, he said. At the time he didn't know they would become, literally, role models. Hirschfeld, who worked with Berkeley Rep and Magic Theater for a decade, also appeared on KPIX·TV's Evening Magazine as a restaurant reviewer in the late '70s.
"In Berkeley, a lot of people live in a time warp," he said. "It's a controlled environment, in a way."
He moved to Los Angeles.
"I guess I'm in law and order now," he said: "But the situation isn't really analogous ,in most respects."
Since 1979 he has appeared as Leo Schnitz, the station officer, in a popular television series, "Hill Street B1ues." Schnitz runs the jail.
***
David Kamornick, 41, who emerged from the FSM to become an attorney in Los Angeles, didn't care for the survey. He was very busy. His answers were very terse. Yes, he said, he is now very Republican. No, he never demonstrates. Ever run for office? ''Heaven forbid."
When asked to name the major issue of the 1980s, he doubled his verbiage: "Whether America is going to develop the moral strength and character to survive."
In a representative sample of former FSM activists interviewed by The Examiner, other answers included:
Jeremy Bruenn, biophysicist: "The population crisis."
Mark Desmet, computer entrepreneur: military spending."
Keith Simons, importer: Polarization."
Julie Wellings, jeweler: "The deficit."
Mark Switzer, environmentalist: "Natural resources."
Donna Watson, electrician: "Central America."
Dominating the survey responses (60 percent) was the possibility of nuclear destruction. Many ex-FSM demonstrators said they have switched to support for the nuclear freeze and protest against weapons research at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
• "Our actions in the next five years will determine if we survive," said Helaine Grabowski McLain, an artist.
• "All other issues pale by comparison said Rodney Mullen, who runs a drug and alcohol treatment center.
• "The scariest thing is that we can kill ourselves so easily," said architect Michael Sheats.
***
His hair was splotched with peroxide in the Style of punk rock. He stood on the Haste Street sidewalk in Berkeley, lounging against a fading mural alongside a Telegraph Avenue restaurant. Designed by Osha Neumann in 1976, the mural starts with Mario Savio atop the police car (1964) and telescopes history in a westerly direction past People's Park (1969).
The youngster told Examiner photographer Fran Ortiz he had never heard of Savio or the FSM.
"I wasn't born until 1967," he said.
In the 1960s, most movement activists chuckled at the theories of sociologist Lewis Feuer, who contended in books and articles that the root cause of the FSM was generational conflict.
When asked about punk-rock anti-war protests, however, veterans of the FSM didn't see much similarity to their own protest behavior 20 years ago.
Elin Calvin, mother of a 10-year-old girl in Berkeley, said, "If Meadow came home like that, I don't know what I would do. It's not sweetness and light, like us. It's not hopeful. It's very angry.
"It seems to be more than just style, all that Spandex and green hair. It's successful street theater, and they're very up-front about it. We didn't admit it."
Stephen Gabow, 42, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University, said, "The only thing I don't like about them is their studs, the dangerous spikes. I like their music. More power to them."
Most of those in the survey were negative (29 percent) or ambivalent (32 percent) toward the War Chest Tours protests by young people in punk-rock costume during the Democratic National Convention. Only a few (14 percent) expressed a positive view; the rest were uninformed, noncommittal or unwilling to answer.
Keig, the real estate mogul, was less reticent.
"I just wonder," he said, "if society wouldn't be better served if these people were all in prison."
Patricia Eliet, English professor in Los Angeles, said she isn't sure if most people in punk outfits are really all that alienated.
"They're basically just wearing funny outfits and causing consternation," she said. "They are very nihilistic, not political. But it's always good to have dissent."
She said she doesn't understand what's happening.
"It might be a factor of my age," said Eliet, 48. "It seems very different from what we did. But I don't feel qualified to say. My students who dress punk seem more aware and interesting than the others."
Charles Artman, 45, who once lived in a teepee near Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and roamed the streets of Berkeley barefoot in his LSD priest robes, had no kind words for punk rockers.
"All they're out for is attention," he said. "They dye their hair pink and cut it weird. They don't give a damn about anybody but themselves."
***
Question: What do you think of the cynical remark that in 1964, people in Berkeley talked about revolution; in 1974, about psychic and spiritual growth, and in 1984, about new restaurants?
Sample answers:
Michael Sheats, Berkeley architect—''I'm in the same stream. No more Red Mountain for me."
John Huntington, Chicago professor—"It has the truth of cynicism, yeah."
John Reinsch, Fresno physician—"It sounds like it comes from Time magazine. Since Berkeley has always been at the forefront, hopefully we will see a spinoff in some better restaurants in Fresno."
Richard Adelman, Oakland musician—"What's cynical about it is that it says more people follow the drift, and there's no idealism. It's a false dichotomy."
Ethel Jacoff Weinberger, Vermont teacher—"I don't know any people like that. It's sad if true."
Joseph Botkin, Berkeley cabbie—"This generation is dormant now. Hedonism grips us all. But I am one of those who talks about restaurants. I'm agog at how much good food is out there. My palate has become sophisticated. And so many people are starving..."
Michael R. Smith, UC attorney—"What ex-radicals have in common is a sense of what chef has moved where and what vintage to look for."
Marvin Tener, Philadelphia computer consultant—"It's certainly true. It's a very apt characterization. Alice Waters (proprietor of Chez Panisse) may make more difference in the world than the leaders of the FSM. That is one of the reasons why I left Berkeley eventually. It was funny to live in a place where food was the biggest issue."
Steve Robman, Manhattan stage dIrector—"Interesting. The question is, Are these the same people? Among my friends in Berkeley the joke is that these are the new Hipousie."
***
"Money is important only when there isn't enough," said Martha Bergmann Platt, 41, who gave up her librarian career to become a student of horticulture. "I like much more to have free time than money."
Divorced, the mother of a 10-year-old daughter, she works part-time as a receptionist at UC-Berkeley. She earns $8,000 a year.
Most FSM veterans said in the survey they are reasonably happy with their income level, which averages $34,000.
"Money is abused more than any other substance," said Kenneth Barter, 43, an alcohol education counselor in Virginia who gets about $31,000 a year. "It's by far the most addictive of all substances."
Michael Shub, a mathematics professor in New York, with an annual income of about $60,000, said, "I live well and like it."
Keig, which rhymes with Haig, is probably the most affluent entrepreneur among FSM alumni in The Examiner survey. He said he didn't get rich by thinking about it.
"I probably laid 200,000 bricks myself," he said.
After getting a master's degree in economics in 1965, Keig was trying to get a credential for junior college teaching. It was blocked because of his FSM arrest.
Although the matter was straightened out eventually with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, Keig had already begun fixing up old apartment buildings in Berkeley. Today he has about 35 apartments in Berkeley, 150 altogether with other investments that include a gas station and art gallery in Carmel.
"Money is the thing that lets you do the things you want to do," said Keig, a bachelor who admits he has little time for anything frivolous. "It's not a value in itself, but it conveys freedom."
***
End quotes:
"I'm certainly glad there are other people out there still fighting," said importer Keith Simons.Switzer, the environmentalist, said, "I see from my own political perspective that it's a long haul. That's OK. I'm older now. My expectations and demands aren't the same as when I was 18. I still believe in the essential spirit of what motivated people in 1964."
Tener, the computer man, said, "The country has a bunch of people who freaked out, who pretend the '60s and '70s never happened."
Mark Desmet, owner of a computer company, said, "Remember, Jack Weinberg said, 'Don't trust anyone over 30.' He was right. In some ways, I did sell out."
POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE
(figures in percent)Most accurate label:……………1984…….1964*…..1964**
Conservative Republican………. 10………...3…….…. 0
Liberal Republican………………. 7.5……..10…….…. 2
Conservative Democrat…………. 7.5….…..10…….…. 2
Liberal Democrat………………. 30………..48…..…. 39
Democratic socialist…………… 30………...17…...…. 35
Revolutionary socialist………...… 5……….....3…….... 18
Other………………………...... 10……..…..#………. #Based on a representative sample of FSM activists.
* First-time demonstrators surveyed by Glen Lyons after police car incident, October 1964.
** Veteran demonstrators, October 1964.Remarks:
"Not any of these. I used to be a revolutionary socialist, but every time a revolutionary vanguard takes control it destroys the goals of the movement."—Stephen Gabow, anthropology professor
"As far as domestic policies go, I’m a liberal Democrat. As for foreign policy, I would describe myself as a reactionary Republican."
—Jeremy Bruenn, biophysicist"Closet anarchy."
—Lee Goldblatt Nixon, former teacher"Democratic socialist. But it doesn’t exist."
—Richard Adelman, musicianU.S. Group†
Liberal ………………………..…… 10
Slightly liberal …………………..….. 13
Middle of the road ………...………. 22
Slightly conservative ……………..… 24
Conservative ………………………. 19
Extremely conservative …..……..…… 1
Can’t say ….……………………….. 11† The "U.S." comparison group was selected by age, race and educational characteristics to conform to the FSM survey group.
STAYING IN TOUCH
Do you remain in contact with other FSM people?
(figures in percent)Yes …..………………. 38
No ……………………. 35
Occasionally …….…… 17Remarks:
"No. I don’t stay in touch with a single other person from the Free Speech Movement. It just happened that way."
—William Knight, mathematics professor"I stay in touch with my roommates. All three were arrested in the Free Speech Movement."
—Stephen Leonard, asst. attorney general, Massachusetts"No. I moved around so much, I lost touch with my past."
—Dana Kramer-Rolls, clerkBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
MAJOR POLITICAL ISSUE OF THE 1980s
(figures in percent)Nuclear war / foreign policy ……… 60
Economy …………………...………. 4
Women’s rights ……..……………… 2
Central America ………………...….. 9
Liberalism versus conservatism ….... 6
Environment …………………….…. 6
Other ……………………………..... 13Remarks:
"The arms race and nuclear war. By definition, it eclipses everything else."
—Michael Marcus, attorney"I have a fundamental faith in the resiliency of the American people. But environmental and nuclear issues could end it all. If the world goes on, things will work themselves out."
—Marvin Tener, computer consultantBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
BACK TO THE BARRICADES
(figures in percent)Given the same set of circumstances 20 years later, would you go through the FSM sit-in again?
Yes …………………… 60
No ……….…...………. 15
Probably ……………… 15
No comment ………….. 10Remarks:
"Yes, if I was magically transported back, knowing what I know now. Then, of course, I was student with little to lose. Today I have a job, house, car; if the FSM jeopardized those, it could be a big deterrent."
—Kenneth Barter, alcohol education counselor"Probably. But at age 43, there are a lot of things I do differently today. Even playing basketball. My goals are similar. But my body is a little slower getting up out of the chair."
—Gorden Bergsten, economics professor"At the moment I have no courage of activism. I am older and it is harder to get ideologically committed. I’m just trying to stay alive."
—Joseph Botkin, cabdriver"I’d probably be in the Academic Senate yelling."
—Michael Shub, mathematics professorBased on a representative sample of FSM activists.
How Berkeley has changed since the FSM
By George Frost
Examiner staff writerHe printed thousands of Free Speech Movement leaflets, manifestos and critiques 20 years ago, but today David Goines takes a critical view of politics and activism.
''Trying to change things through politics is like the fat lady on the ice," said Goines. "The more she waves her arms and tries to correct herself, the more she spins out of control."
Goines ran the FSM mimeograph machine in 1964. Today he is Berkeley's most famous poster artist.
His best-known poster depicts the artist himself poised over a glass of wine at Chez Panisse.
The Free Speech Movement brought many agents of change together in a spontaneous community of protest. When it ended, most left town.
Those who stayed in Berkeley differ now on what the FSM meant and where it led.
Goines said he was not politically minded during the FSM.
"I was not the brilliant strategist," he said. "I was in charge of hewing wood and drawing water, the person who actually did the work."
He became a printer's apprentice after he was ejected from the university. He said he was tossed out at the end of his freshman year, just before the FSM, for distributing a vituperative critique of courses and instructors.
He also joined the FSM.
"During the FSM, the First Amendment was not an abstraction," he said. "It was my right to speak that was denied."
Goines is at work on another poster I for The North Face, a backpacking emporium. Work and creative solutions, he said, offer answers more effective than politics.
"If I felt that nuclear power was bad, just suppose," he said, "the stupidest thing I could do is write a letter to my congressman. The smartest would be to invent an alternative form of energy."
He called anti-nuclear picketing "stupid," but defends the underlying right to protest.
"I'm still a First Amendment believer," he said. "The university got its hand slapped (by the FSM) and I'm pleased it has not tried to take back what we gained. I don't see how you could deny the right of one group to speak, however noisome, without undermining the rights of all."
Goines draws the line at the threshold of his print shop.
"Private property is a different matter," he said. "If you come in here and talk like a Nazi, I will punch your head off. Go out in the street. You can talk all you want."
***
Political posters, storefront organizations and protest handbills are scarce nowadays in the three blocks of Telegraph Avenue just south of the university's entrance at Bancroft Way.
Instead, visitors find 24 stores—most of them expensive—offering clothing, shoes or fancy T-shirts. Telegraph also houses a dozen restaurants, hofbraus, gourmet sandwich shops and coffee-and-croissant havens. One drugstore. One grocery. One bank. One bookstore. A dozen small businesses.
On an emergency motion by Mayor Gus Newport, the Berkeley City Council voted this week to consider commercial rent control for the blocks on Telegraph Avenue nearest the campus.
Rents have shot up as chains such as Mrs. Field's Cookies, White Mountain Ice Creamery and The Record Factory have moved into the area.
Bluebeard's, a men's clothing store, and Kashi Printers, typical of small businesses on the street, are closing.
The city already has the nation's only commercial rent control, but it's limited to two blocks in the Elmwood District far from the campus.
The Telegraph Avenue rents—up to $4 per square foot—don't affect the street vendors who gather in People's Park to draw lots for prime locations nearest the university entrance. They hawk hats, ties, jewelry and crafts. Others shuffle tarot cards, toss the I Ching or scrutinize palms.
Moe's Bookstore, once a hangout for revolutionaries, has been transformed from a dim cavern of used books. Now it is light, airy and antiseptic. The front display window features "The Joy of Pizza" and "The Chez Panisse Pasta Book."
On the Bancroft Strip, where the students of 1964 dispensed political leaflets from card tables, seven semi-permanent booths dispense bagels, falafel, burritos, pasta, sushi and chocolate croissants.
***
John Searle, now chairman of the philosophy department at UC-Berkeley, praised the FSM 20 years ago, but said the victory created "unrealistic" expectations. Many students believed The Revolution had begun.
He said: "They abandoned their studies and took up revolutionary change."
He counseled students to hit the books. There would be no revolution in America, he told them.
"It would hurt property values."
The FSM, he said, achieved the limited yet noble aim of guaranteeing students the same rights of free speech that they had in the community at large.
"I didn't want the university to be a radical playground," he said. "And it wasn't.
"The structure of intellectual life at Berkeley Is pretty much the same as in 1964."
This year, Searle was chosen for the British Broadcasting Co.-sponsored Reith Lectures. It was the first invitation to a philosopher since Bertrand Russell in 1948. Searle's theme, he said, is the place of human beings in the universe, an attempt to reconcile idealism and materialism.
Searle was more cynical discussing human beings in Berkeley.
He contrasted the genteel liberalism of the university to the gritty radicalism of city politics.
"The ironic thing," he said, "is that while the nutty element never predominated on campus, Berkeley does have the most irresponsible city government in the country."
In most college towns, he said, liberal educators battle a conservative city government composed of Realtors and car dealers. Not in Berkeley.
Berkeley Citizens Action took control of the City Council last week for the first time. As more than 300 activists whooped, Mayor Newport proclaimed, "If, in fact, radical change is what it takes, we are well-prepared to make that change."
In its first session, the 8-1 majority approved legislation that grants benefits to live-in spouses of city employees, makes it illegal to evict tenants with low or moderate incomes and bars all condominium conversions.
Concludes Searle: "It is hard for the university liberals to take on Gus Newport."
***
"Essentially, we want to create a village lifestyle," said Berkeley computer pioneer Lee Felsenstein.
He added, "Without the idiocy."
Its nexus is the Community Memory Project, an innovative computer bulletin board for Berkeley residents who wish to sell services, rent a room or just communicate.
Felsenstein was among the founders of the prototype in the early 70s.
From FSM card files to the explosive proliferation of personal computers, he traces the natural evolution of a new form of community.
"The reason there are personal computers today is because of a community—the Home Brew Club," he said. "And the Community Memory Project was really the basis for development."
Members of the club, who got together in the early 1970s for the joy of computing, included people who later would be considered pioneers of the industry. With Felsenstein were Apple Computer co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steven Jobs and Computer Faire founder Jim Warren.
Felsenstein helped design the Osborne personal computer and now serves as president of the development company he founded, Golemics.
Back in 1964, before anyone heard of microcomputers, he had developed a card-filing system to help track hundreds of activists who volunteered an hour here or there in the often-hectic FSM.
"The organizational structure of the FSM was not hierarchical," he said. ''The heavies in the front office were just trying to keep up with all that was happening. It looked just like an early Community Memory Project with cards all over the place, people dropping by."
The card-filing system was a tool, albeit limited, to help FSM protesters to organize themselves.
"There was none of this business about 'wait for orders,'" he said. "What happened was this amorphous mass of students organized itself into community and was able, with that kind of integrity, to battle the administration.
The personal computer revolution, he said, grew out of an effort to recapture "community" after the turmoil and alienation of the '60s.
Out of the Community Memory Project, he predicted, would come new social institutions.
"All the innovative development came about because the lines of communication were open laterally," he said. "It Is nothing but synergy."
***
Campus policeman John Teel has walked the Sproul Plaza beat for 25 years.
Pointing at a group of long-haired youths, he said, "I'm going to get every one of those bums."
"Riffraff," he called them. Each day they come from off the campus to sell drugs and panhandle, he said.
"After the FSM," he said, "all the crazies in the world thought they could come here and hang out. That was one bad consequence."
Teel, who sat with Jack Weinberg in the trapped police car Oct. 1, 1964, endorsed the principle of free political speech on campus, if not the tactics employed by the FSM.
He said protest turned violent after 1964.
"One thing led to another and we had mob rule, rocks thrown, trashing…"
Approvingly, he said, "Berkeley is going back to the '60s more than ever before. But now students are changing things by voting and education."
If there is a campus legacy of the FSM, Teel walks through it each day. Sometimes, he said, the pandemonium gets to him.
Nearby, clean-cut Young Republicans vied with Lesbians Against Animal Experimentation, break dancers,
a religious zealot and a conga player for the attention of passers-by."Free speech," he muttered.
***
Stephen Lustig, re-elected to the Berkeley school board in November, proudly calls himself an activist.
One of 783 arrested during, the Sproul Hall sit-in 20 years ago, he credits the FSM.
He said, "It showed me that people working together could bring about change in institutions that appeared unwilling."
With victory, he said, came a responsibility to get involved and work for political causes.
Lustig helped organize the Vietnam Day Committee, picketed in Jack London Square for equal employment and marched for integration in Oakland.
He married FSM activist Linda Smith in 196fi. They have three children. It was a political romance.
"We met during the sit-in," he said. "We began dating during the trial. We have worked together over the years on many things we both believe in."
Lustig said the character of .political protest changed in the late '60s. Many activists became alienated. Others just burned out.
"There were a few years of great involvement politically," he said. ''The Third World struggle, Cambodia, the Kent State killings, People's Park. The immensity of it all ..."
Student protest didn't play in England. Consider this courteous note to students from the Warden of Wadham College of Oxford University.
Dear Gentlemen: We note your threat to take what you call "direet action" unless your demands are immediately met. We feel that It Is only sporting to let you know that our governing board includes three experts In chemical warfare, two ex-commandos skilled with dynamite and torturing prisoners, four qualified marksmen In both small arms and rifles, two ex-artillerymen, one holder of the Victoria Cross, four karate experts and a chaplain.
The governing body has authorized me to tell you that we look forward with confidence to what you call a "confrontation," and, I may say, even with anticipation.
The research and the researchers
Researcher Jacqueline Frost contributed to these stories.
Assisting with consultation and data preparation were Dr. Richard Deleon, director of the San Francisco State University Public Research Institute, and Ed Emerson, a graduate student.
This survey is based on a random sample from the FSM arrest list. Most figures come from a final group of 49; in some cases the base number is larger.
The potential sampling error is plus or minus 16 "at the 95 percent confidence level." This would indicate it is reasonable to draw some basic inferences.
The "USA" comparison group, sharing similar age, race and education with the FSM sample, is a "selected subset" of 131 respondents from a 1980 study by the Center for Policy Studies at the University of Michigan.
