The campus, the lake, the hippies, the chicks, the posters, the leaflets, the debates – what a swirl for a guy from Waukegan! I made sure to take a class in philosophy. I waded my way through Thomas Aquinas and other metaphysical frameworks to declare that I was a logical positivist. It was kind of a scientific philosophy with set ways of determining the truth. This had been a goal in choosing Wisconsin and in leaving Marquette. My sister Jane recently shared a letter she had received from my mom about those days. It said, “Billy has stopped going to Mass. He is always reading. He is always looking for ‘The Truth’.”
It was not long before I discovered the dynamics of Marxism. How could you not in those days? The History Department was filled with radical historians. The campus was crawling with “red diaper babies”. I went to collating parties for Paul Buhle’s journal, Radical America, just to soak up the debates and the chatter. Though most of the Jewish radicals didn’t personally know each other from the East Coast, they were usually affectionate and familiar with each other.
The pivotal moment for me came on an October day in 1967. I had just changed my major from Psychology to History. It had been a huge personal crisis point. I was already a junior. At U of W, Psych was geared toward experiments and statistics; History featured analysis of social change.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was calling for a protest on the 18th against Dow Chemical recruiters. That company was well known as the manufacturer of gelatinous death, napalm. Fireballs falling from the sky on Vietnamese villages were always on the nightly news. I showed up at the foot of Bascom Hill. There were two columns, one for those who would sit in and one for those who would picket in support outside. I positioned myself with the supporters. The San Francisco Mime troupe was there with white face and tambourines revving up the spirit of the crowd.
We began running up Bascom Hill. As we passed through the doors of the Commerce Building, I realized that, in my excitement, I had joined the obstructers. So I sat down with at least 200 others. It felt like something out of the civil rights movement – freedom songs, harmonica riffs, and a sense of purpose. When the Madison police came in, they came in swinging clubs. Our instructions were to hold tight to one another and passively resist arrest. But a panic ensued and most of the students fled toward the rear exit. I moved forward to help those who were resisting at the police line. Helmeted cops separated me from a tangle. They dragged me to the front to be loaded into a paddy wagon. They banged me with clubs across the back and legs. I grabbed onto a coed and held on tight. Beyond the police lines, the students were calling on us to escape. She and I scooted into the crowd of angry students.
Somehow the intensity of that confrontation gave rise to a crazy plan. I decided I wanted to find out the name of the girl I had been entangled with. And I wanted to have sex with her. Somehow I felt that the drama of Dow had opened a rip in the space/time continuum. Was it simple opportunism? Maybe a need for some comfort from the storm? Maybe some combination of heroic excitement and male chauvinism? Maybe wanting to become a free love hippy.
A couple days later I called and visited her tiny apartment. She was a grad student with a lot of counter cultural style. In those days we used the term “Beat” more than hippy. We ran out of conversation after we reflected a bit on the police brutality. When she locked the apartment door from the inside, I saw it as a clue that maybe I could get inside her bedroom. But then I told myself that I didn’t know her. It got awkward and I let the moment pass. I probably used the beatnik phrase about having to split.
The Dow protest kicked off a couple weeks of additional rallies. It made all the big national newspapers and set the tone for other protests against university complicity with the war. The CIA was set to recruit on campus within the next month.
I wanted that protest to be even bigger. Dow was the beginning of my commitment to the movement. It would consume me for the next 15 years.