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CounterPunch
November
21, 2002
False
Consciousness in Berkeley, Then and Now
Just for the Sake of a Roach They Ditched Him
The Betrayal of Lenny Glaser
by MICHAEL ROSSMAN
CounterPunch runs this memoir of a
betrayal by the Free Speech Movement back in the Sixties because
November 21, 2002, sees a betrayal of the memory of that movement
and of one of its leaders, Mario Savio.
On the UC Berkeley Campus a lecture
series established by his widow in memory of this great anti-war
orator will be inaugurated by a fanatic advocate of war against
Iraq, Christopher Hitchens. It is as though the keynote speaker
at a conference honoring the memory of Martin Luther King was
an FBI agent defending the Cointelpro program.
The central figure in Rossman's riveting
narrative is now known as Lenni Brenner, an organizer and author
now active in New York, a CounterPunch contributor with his lively
memoir of his tutelage of Bob Dylan on New York's lower east
side.
How much more appropriate it would
have been if Brenner, not Hitchens, were to speak this Thursday
night in the Berkeley Student Union.
AC/JSC
As background to this story of betrayal, one should
understand the role of Lenny Glaser (later known as Lenni Brenner)
in the political culture of the Berkeley campus during the era
leading to the Free Speech Movement. If one can summarize six
rich years of history by saying that SLATE was the key organizer
of students' increasing expression of civil liberties, one might
say on the same scale that Lenny Glaser was the individual exemplar
of free speech.
For years, his thoughtful and passionate
tirades greeted students on cold mornings, assailed them at noon
as they hurried past the pedestal at Bancroft and Telegraph where
he perched, eyes gleaming as he criticized Kennedy during the
Cuban Missile Crisis, mocked the Pope's stand on birth control,
told us marijuana wouldn't make us crazy. One must understand
the era's context, still shadowed with  McCarthyism's chill, to grasp how aberrant
his act seemed; and one must understand the subtext of collective
feelings, gathering to erupt in the later 1960's, to grasp the
shameful fascination of his lingering words and example for many
who hurried past, averting their eyes from that crazy guy.
In the annals of campus political history,
the laurel for solitary courage is often credited to Fred Moore,
for his fast on Sproul Hall's steps in 1961 in protest of compulsory
military training. Yet to my mind, the courage of Glaser's lonely
example was as vivid, long sustained, and more fertile in influencing
the emerging culture of political expression.
Of course, Glaser's act drew the attention
of campus administrators and the police. That these authorities
were not friendly then to such liberty of speech is well-known,
but one must appreciate the particular structure of their hostility,
which led them to view Glaser as more than an individual nut.
From 1958 on, local administrators had been called not simply
to deal with the consequences of an increasingly active student
political movement, but to understand the dynamics of its development
among a student mass that had seemed quite tractable.
During 1960-1961, I participated in a
liberal salient of their inquiry in meetings convened by Dean
of Men Arleigh Williams. But their political perspectives were
divided, and the views of Vice Chancellor Sherriffs came instead
to govern administrative perceptions, applying a theory of malignancy
to describe our troublesome development as driven by the infectious
agency of Red-stained "non-student agitators."
At this distance, the paranoia of the
administration's analysis is clearly visible as a relic of early
Cold War culture, remarkable in its persistence. Gathering momentum
continually, this view did not reach the apex of its folly until
after the anti-war movement's escalation in 1967. But its thorough
entrenchment by 1964 was reflected in President Kerr's incautious
assertion that 49 percent of the FSM demonstrators were "followers
of the Mao-Castro line," and his subsequent "correction"
allowing that only a small minority were Red provocateurs. The
gulf of understanding thus demonstrated was essential to the
campus administration's provocation and subsequent mismanagement
of the free speech crisis, and to its extraordinary intervention
in Glaser's legal case.
To account for this impropriety, one
must also understand the state of mind of the adminstrators involved.
The rising, fractious tide of student dissent had suddenly come
home, as protest against the decree banning political tables
escalated out of control. The unprecedented sit-ins and police-car
blockade of September 30 and October 1-2 left ranking administrators
in a hysterical state, seeking external agencies to blame for
the disturbance and means to quell it. By October 8 University
officials filed a petition to revoke Glaser's probation, on grounds
(as later summarized by the appeals judge) that he "had
been creating a disturbance and interfering with an officer in
the performance of his duties" on September 30 and October
1.
During a prior series of arrests for
civil rights activity, Glaser had been cited also for possession
of a marijuana roach. Although conviction on this count threatened
a term of one to ten years, he had been granted probation. In
that era, considerations of due process did not extend to revocation
hearings, since probation and revocation were still seen as discretionary
gestures by judges. The University sent a representative to the
probation hearing to testify against Glaser, who was not allowed
to present witnesses on his own behalf. His probation was revoked,
leaving him to serve thirty-nine months in the state prison in
San Luis Obispo.
At the time, such details of the university's
intervention were unknown to the FSM political community. All
we knew, vaguely and somewhat inaccurately, was that campus police
had caused Glaser's arrest for possession a roach and that he
had vanished. But it was clear that he had been specially targeted
as a political troublemaker, that the marijuana charge was a
pretext for his removal from the scene of ongoing protest, and
that he needed and merited our support.
To our shame, I must record that we lifted
barely a voice and not one finger in his behalf. A few spoke
for him at the Executive Committee meeting of October 18, where
it was decided that some would study the matter and report back;
I doubt that they did. I think we may even have considered his
defense at a Steering Committee meeting and decided against it.
The injustice of his case was glaring and closedly linked to
the one we were protesting. But our response was paralyzed, as
much by inner conflict as by outward considerations.
In retrospect, it may seem simply prudent
for us to have averted our attention from Glaser's predicament.
Beside having so much else on our hands, we had strong reason
to distance our movement from his case. Desperate for public
support, in a climate where newspapers were contending to publicize
the Commie agitators responsible for our rebellion, we could
ill afford to have the FSM identified also with drug use by supporting
a pot-smoking Trotskyist sure to be spotlighted, accurately,
as a crusader against drug laws.
So we backed off from this hot potato,
so quickly we may scarcely be said to have encountered it --
savoring our senses of being prudent protectors of our movement,
to mitigate the sense of shame some also felt at abandoning Glaser
and the issues he represented. For by then many of us had come
not only to understand that marijuana use should not be construed
as a crime but to recognize the very issue of regulation of such
consciousness-affecting agents as a key frontier of civil liberties,
extending protection of freedom of thought and expression.
In this light, Glaser's years of campus
preachment had been entirely political, rather than divided embarrasingly
between politics and drugs, as many activists of traditional
political mind had viewed them; and the roach was not just a
pretext for arrest, but integral to his case. The FSM could hardly
have supported him properly without expanding its consciousness
of its own cause. What wonder we shirked the theoretical and
practical complications involved!
This story of injustice and cowardice
-- of the university's extraordinary, unconscionable persecution
of a political agitator and the Free Speech Movement's failure
to contest it -- is part of the buried history of the FSM and
of the peculiar war against marijuana continuing to this day.
In The Spiral of Conflict Heirich dubiously cites a professor's
impression that Glaser was the first to throw himself before
the police car to entrap it. In Berkeley at War, Rorabaugh repeats
this claim drawing on a Jan.24, 1968 San Francisco Express-Times
story on Glaser's release from prison.
As I suggest elsewhere, though the claim
may be slightly false in fact, it is true in spirit. Glaser was
among the first to try to stop the car and likely the loudest
to yell for help; and he was almost certainly the one most recognizable
to campus police, who may indeed have mistaken him as the chief
instigator of our novel defiance, given their mind-set of infectious
"non-student" agents and their prior assessment of
him as among the worst.
Lacking sufficient documentation, I cannot
say with certainty whether the impulse to put Glaser away originated
with the campus police or in the administration. But surely his
prominent role was soon brought to the attention of key administrators,
most notably Sherriffs, who were scrambling to understand what
had happened, and surely the action against him proceeded with
their oversight and blessing.
In The Free Speech Movement (184-185n)
Goines quotes Rorabaugh's indirectly derived version of this
story and adds an alternative account of Glaser's jailing. Though
each version is as plausible as the rumors that reached us then,
neither is accurate about the process, and neither recognizes
the administration's aggressive role in Glaser's imprisonment.
Goines mentions "the Executive Committee meeting, where
both Mario and I made impassioned speeches about solidarity and
not letting [Glaser] fry all alone," and notes that nothing
came of this but doesn't discuss why.
The story of Glaser's betrayal forms
the Afterword to Rossman's "The
Rossman Report, A Memoir of Making History," (in)
Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnik (Editors) The
Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s
(University of California Press, 2002.). For Rossman's extended
account of his own role in enacting and recording the history
of the FSM movement he has supplied CounterPunch with the full
memoir.
Lenni (Glaser) Brenner has written several
stories for CounterPunch, including a recent memoir on Dave
Van Ronk's influence on Bob Dylan. Brenner is the author
of the new book, The
Hidden Documents of Zionism.
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