As the 60’s changed to 70’s, Milwaukee was turning out to be a whole new experience. I came in contact with a mélange of different people who were resisting war and racism in their own ways. Everything was more high stakes. The edges were harder. There was no dominant culture of protest like in Madison.
There were Yippies, Welfare Rights Organizations, Migrant Opportunity Centers, left wing sects, SDS at Marquette and UWM, Vietnam Veterans, women’s liberation groups, and the Weathermen. Yippies were followers of the Youth International Party. They sported the most extreme hippy garb and staged activities like pushing a pie in the face of pro-war spokespersons. Their ‘Street Sheet’ called for “the overthrow of government, money, smack (heroin), authority, and the nuclear family.” More and more my own rhetoric was changing from protest to revolution of a more classic variety. It was a drastic mis-assessment of the situation. It would lead me to some disastrous consequences.
To survive, I spent all of a small bank account that I had built up over the years, mostly from crisp twenty dollar bills given to me for birthdays by my Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom. I had a ’56 Chevy that Uncle Tom had given me. I worked a series of temporary and part time jobs – as a book binder, longshoreman, cabbie, foundry worker.
We formed a study group and called it a collective. We had friendly relations with other similar groups in Racine, Chicago, Detroit, and Madison. Nationally, Students for a Democratic Society had splintered into two main trends. One was the Weathermen who espoused extremely militant street demonstrations as well as bombings. My choice was the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), which placed emphasis on winning draft-age youth to anti-war and anti-racist activism.
We went to a conference in Detroit where RYM collectives from around the Midwest were sharing experiences. There I met Bill Ayers at a party. He was preaching a Weatherman line about how white workers had to voluntarily give up wage levels that were above those of African Americans. He seemed to enjoy irritating me. I concluded then that he was an idiot. Since those days he, like me, has had to re-define his life and come to terms with earlier ideas. It takes a lifetime to really decide how we responded to the twists of history.
I may not have realized it at the time, but the dichotomy – revolutionary rhetoric on the north side and a different tone among white youth on the other side of the industrial valley – threw us for a loop. I couldn’t keep up that much outreach to white youth like we had done in Waukegan. Large numbers of middle class and working class young people were displaying their alienation. Hippies and Yippies congregated at Milwaukee’s East Side fountain on a nightly basis.
Anti-war activities were hitting a crescendo. The actions ranged from the defense of the 14 pacifists who had publicly burned 10,000 draft records to the militant counter cultural expressions of the shaggy hippies. My friends and I leaned toward a constituency that was more obviously working class and white. I put grease in my hair and wore a leather jacket as I bounced from one protest to the next.
I listened to Country and Western – if not for the music itself but for the hints about white working class sensibilities. I started collecting tools to do my own car repairs. Once I changed engines in an American Motors Hornet that I owned. Everything went fine until the final test, starting it up. I had used two inch bolts instead of shorter ones. They wedged the flywheel against the engine block. One of my best helpers in those days was Jo Mahaffey. She was a former textile worker from North Carolina. She was our own Norma Rae.
We saw the whole world as a revolutionary cauldron – the Tet Offensive, worker-student rebellion in France, African Liberation movements, socialism in Cuba. But Milwaukee was not that. The long jail sentences for the Milwaukee Black Panthers, the deployment of the “Red Squad” of the police department to watch our every move, the whipping up of patriotism to support the troops – all these showed the other side of the equation.
I can remember long telephoto lenses sticking out of attic windows across from some of our radical hangouts and bookstores. A Yippee named Randy Anderson was shot dead by a cop in those years. His friends said it was a police ambush of an attempted grocery store firebombing that has been suggested by a paid provocateur.
According to my FBI files, I was put on something called the Agitator Index. Supposedly an informant heard me say that I would kill Hubert Humphrey if I had the chance. I don’t remember saying that. Maybe the informant was making up something juicy. If I did say it, it was not serious.
My only experience with LSD in those years came when an attractive informant took me to bed at our near south side crash pad. Her name was Mary Lou. In later years, I learned that she had put other notches of conquest on her bed post – trysting with Yippee leaders as well. None of my friends, the wannabe revolutionaries, were even potheads.
Of the many variants, the most vexing to us were the Weathermen. Fortunately they didn’t last long in Milwaukee. They went underground in about 1970. Typical of their approach, they labeled anyone who disagreed with them as a “pig”. John Fuerst made the mistake of calling me a pig once over at Rhubarb Book store. A raging guy in those days, I heard him say, “What did you do that for?” when I broke his glasses across his nose with one punch.
Soon after this, John Fuerst went underground to avoid jail for a violent confrontation with Chicago Police in the Days of Rage. He later was investigated by the FBI for purchasing 50 pounds of dynamite in Tucson. More recently I have heard that he is a partner at one of the Big 3 accounting firms in the Pacific Northwest.
But as opposed to the Weathermen as we were, we couldn’t avoid some of the same wrong attitudes. We equated militancy with social change. We were impressed with the Black Panthers and wanted to prove that we were not afraid of confrontation with police. Knowing that many of my former grade and high school classmates were among the half million guys slogging through rice paddies and jungles, I wanted to stand up for them. We were in our early twenties.
I made an appeal for conscientious objector status. On re-reading the essay, I realize that I sabotaged my own claim. I didn’t express much horror with warfare. I made a big deal of my disillusionment with religion and talked vaguely of concern for humanity. But deep inside, I was very sensitive that someone would think that I was resisting because I was shy of violence. I was ashamed of the fact that I had fainted in a Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC) class in high school when they showed us an extremely gory first aid training film. I was denied conscientious objector status.
I found myself in the cross hairs of criticism more than once from the women in the movement. When one of them spurned my efforts to get intimate, I sought some sympathy by saying that I was just a guy who had been sandwiched between two sisters as a little boy. I somehow moderated the women’s lib attacks by saying that I couldn’t handle so much female criticism. With that I left the Meineke Ave apartment and moved to a flat on the South Side, where I stayed with a bunch of guys. Across the alley, there was another “crib” where four female refugees from Madison were staying.
Once there was a big strategy meeting to plan for defense of the Milwaukee Three. Once there was a big strategy meeting to plan for defense of the Milwaukee Three. Part way through the meeting, Michael Kaplan announced that he was gay. The meeting was transformed into a new age sensitivity session. When I tried to delicately suggest that we return to the points on the agenda, I was excoriated for being so macho dominant. My reputation as an unreconstructed male chauvinist would follow me for years. It was mostly deserved.