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CounterPunch
November
21, 2002
The Rossman
Report:
a Memoir
of Making History
by MICHAEL ROSSMAN
For Mario, who loved a good read and
efforts at honesty
In the episode of the Free Speech Movement, I
think we were inhabited by spirits larger than ourselves -- somewhere
between ancestral and primordial in nature, and sharply formed.
We had no cultural vision to recognize them as such, nor language
to speak of being the vehicles of what flowed through us. All
we could say even of "the spirit of Democracy" was
that this was a metaphor. And all we knew was that the mundane
world, in which our ordinary selves felt their ways through the
common crisis, had become charged with an extraordinary energy
-- a luminosity at times almost tangible (yet invisible to the
eye, so how could one refer to it?), that made each occasion,
each decision, each act no more than what it funkily was, but
ever so much so, resonant in its significances.
Such a frame seems pertinent to the story
of the report that came informally to bear my name; for I have
always thought that vital dimensions of the FSM episode have
escaped historical recognition and examination. Though I alluded
to them long ago (1), until recently I hardly connected them
with my personal experience of organizing the "Rossman Report."
I saw the Report's story simply as an illustration of the FSM's
participatory energy and spirit, in the usual metaphorical sense.
Readers concerned only with what can be stated precisely may
well take it simply as such, as an exemplar of the FSM's organizing
process, and be satisfied with its face value.
Yet I have come lately to think that
there may be more to it than this. In 1998, working on the website
project of the newly-incorporated Free Speech Movement Archives,
I had a curious experience as I prepared the 1964 text of Administrative
Pressures and Student Political Activity at the University of
California: A Preliminary Report for online re-publication
in an expanded edition. While writing an introduction telling
how the Report came to be, I came to see with a detached eye
how remarkably driven its organizer had been; and to grasp that
my personal story might be more crucial to the social phenomenon
than I had realized or could understand. Given such uncertainty,
how can one know what may seem germane to those who come to see
more clearly? In my account here, I have put some personal data
that may bear on the case.
For thirty-odd years, I discounted my
role in organizing the Report, in terms of bashful modesty which
I believed completely: "Yeah, that's how I got the reputation
as a wizard organizer that put me on the FSM Steering Committee.
But I hardly did anything; I just started asking for help, and
a bunch of folks responded and did it." Looking now at the
surviving internal documents of the project, one might conclude
instead that it was planned and directed in cold rigor and confidence
by someone wearing a verbal costume of confusion and disorganization.
If the disjunction between these views does not testify simply
to my private dissociation, it may also be an artifact of an
experience of possession -- for such spirits as worked
through us imbue their conduits with senses of responsibility
both deeply grasped and hardly to be grasped as personal.
[The Report's
Organizer: His Background and State of Mind]
When the FSM began, I had been at Berkeley
for six years, having transferred in fall 1958 as a junior from
the University of Chicago. That spring, I had been co-leader
of a brief movement of educational reform whose themes, though
tame in comparison, in some regards prefigured the FSM's. (2)
Beyond helping organize the senior skit in high school, this
was my only direct experience as an organizer before the FSM.
I came here in part because friends'
letters reported a tantalizing awakening of political concern.
By the time I arrived, TASC had metamorphosed into SLATE, the
first umbrella organization sheltering the diverse buds of a
new activism. Though never a member, as I am not a joiner, I
was a fellow-traveller, and came shyly to know some of SLATE's
people and stories in the early, small Civil Rights pickets and
peace demonstrations. By spring 1960, when the swell of activism
brought hundreds of Berkeley students to demonstrate against
HUAC and Chessman's execution, in the public birth-cry of the
New Left, I was deeply involved in both affairs as a supporting
journalist, as well as a body on the line and picket captain.
(3)
Disoriented by this climax and conflicting
tugs of life, I dropped out and worked for a year and a half
as a laborer on campus. I remained on staff at the campus literary
magazine, where my early essay on the character of the New Left
was published (4); and served as recording secretary for the
Bay Area Student Committee for Abolition of HUAC while our little,
tense band sent literature and speakers to support-groups nation-wide.
The experience was draining, and alienated me from activist organizing.
I was further disheartened when SLATE was banned from using campus
facilities, in functional retaliation for its role in the anti-HUAC
demonstrations, and all our protests proved futile.
By the time I re-entered school in 1962,
in the depressed aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, I was
hot for study. I undertook graduate work in mathematics as a
Woodrow Wilson Fellow and teaching assistant, so devotedly that
I went to only a handful of demonstrations over the next two
years while the local tide of Civil Rights activism was swelling
to near-constant, epic proportions. I kept in touch through friends
and occasional SLATE parties, wrote political poems, and thought
actively about what was unfolding, for the story of my generation's
activism had come to engage me deeply. But as an actor, I had
reduced myself to just another occasional body on the line, well
back from the front where hundreds by then were being arrested.
By fall 1964, I was so removed from campus action that I didn't
pay much attention to the latest rule-tightening until the gathering
protest was in its second week. I went to check out the novel
midnight vigil on Sproul Steps, but the kids there seemed so
young, and so inappropriately rowdy with their guitars, that
I felt quite alienated, and went back home to study more topology.
In sum, on the eve of my mobilization
as an organizer in the FSM, I had lived through nearly the whole
history of local activism preparing this episode, as a reflective
participant -- in effect, preparing myself to serve as an elder
within this movement, beyond being simply an older member (at
twenty-four). Though I had by then various activist credentials,
most were dated and I wasn't seeking to extend them. My bent
was more literary, to be a political writer, as I became in earnest
after the FSM. (5) I had no training, ambitions, or pretensions
as an historian. At most, I saw myself occasionally as a participant
journalist, recording and interpreting a story unfolding in our
lives.
It is pertinent also, that by fall 1964,
I had been smoking marijuana for eighteen months. That summer,
I had my first experiences with LSD. Such experiences, in the
context of that time, were related to mobilizations of perception
and energy at deep levels for many in the FSM -- how many no-one
knows, for deeply political aversions still inhibit inquiry into
such connections, in fields that lack theory to explain them.
[The Report's
Genesis in a Crucible of Public Dialogue]
Shortly before noon on October 2, I joined
friends on the Terrace to await the promised confrontation, as
groups of the "united front" set up tables in Sproul
Plaza to defy the ban on political expression. The air was already
electric, with blank expectation, when the sudden arrival of
the police car brought us to our feet and shocked me to the core.
Soon enough, cops on campus would become commonplace throughout
the land; but in this first instant of transgression, something
even deeper than a hallowed academic tradition was violated,
and rang me with despair. It was so unfair! As we hurried over,
I felt the whole lonely, demoralizing burden of six years of
striving for a campus toehold against the administration's hostility
rise in me like bile. By the time we got there, they were loading
someone they'd arrested into the car, awkward with his limpness.
A hundred people will tell you they were
the first to sit down to keep the car from taking him away. No
matter what the news-clips show, each is telling a truth; for
it was a moment of collective impulse -- not the first, but the
most immediate and dramatic -- in which we moved as one while
acting as our independent selves. My own move had been rehearsed
four years earlier, when we sprang to block a press car at the
gate to San Quentin during Chessman's execution. We were too
few then, they just kicked us out of the way. But now we were
more -- thirty, a hundred fore and aft, and then more on the
sides, until our seated encirclement stretched ten yards in every
direction within the larger ring of lunchtime students gathering
to gape at the affair. As someone climbed on the car and someone
else went to fetch a megaphone, I let go of the bumper and settled
myself beside a wheel to wait. Ordinary time stood suspended;
we had stopped the Authorities in the act of transgression, and
the instant of impossibility and possibility stretched on, unresolved.
I didn't know who we were -- looking round, I saw some friends
and others I recognized, but they were swamped in strangers.
All I knew was that we had to keep the car, had to keep the open
instant from closing into jail, for it was the first thing we
had won on campus from all the years of struggle and loss.
In this state, transfixed more by the
enormity of our response than by the crime of our governors,
our conversation began. It went on for twenty-seven hours, not
counting a break for sleep. Recordings testify to how funky and
utterly mundane it was, in each stumbling burst of passion or
strategic analysis, each academic note, each play of wit or vow,
the passages of fear. But nothing can convey the way the whole
was transcendent. Sitting there responding to each speaker with
my mind and heart, somewhere even deeper inside I grew utterly
amazed as I realized I was involved in the first public dialogue
I had witnessed in my life.
Though transcribable as such, this was
not an intellectual perception, but a sensate apprehension of
an existential condition through my whole being, before words
could form to describe it. All I can compare it to, thirty-six
years later, is a psychedelic experience of a transcendent spiritual
state -- less because I am frozen in retrospect, than because
I have no other model to describe a radically-altered state of
consciousness in which one perceives nothing as altered save
in revelation of its depths of being. In our case, this change
of state was hard to recognize as such, for we didn't have a
drug conveniently identified as its agent, or a cultural background
to grasp that such transformation could occur as a secular phenomenon,
and its effects were easily mistaken for mere inflammation of
political (or baser) passions. Yet even so, evidence of a radical
alteration of our state remained, so concretely as to seem objective
to those sympathetic with this view. For in the long, suspended
moment of that dialogue, what had been largely an atomized mass
of us became a true public, a participatory polity.
The frame of this occurrence was extraordinary.
We were engaged together in an unprecedented defiance to affirm
core values. All knew, in varying degree, that our careers were
at risk, and our bodies too. We couldn't see the six hundred
cops arming behind Sproul Hall with orders to beat us into the
ground if we resisted, but our premonitions were tangible. In
such circumstance, it's only natural that we came to feel bonded
-- yet something deeper happened among us. I think we created
ourselves as a public through our deliberative dialogue,
created ourselves as citizens in an existential commonweal, pledged
together, uncertainly dependent upon each other. In the months
that followed, as we worked out our roles in the drama, we were
proud to be recognized by sympathizers as bearers of the spirits
of Liberty and Democracy, and deeply reassured to see ourselves
so -- less because any inner doubts were stilled, I reckon, than
because we were so certain that this description was merely a
metaphor. To be bearers-on of precious tradition in a vital circumstance,
to be citizens, was already so real and rich and strange
a role or state that we could hardly grasp it fully, or be moved
to wonder further as we clung to its familiarities. Even so,
a glow I could not see persisted in my perception, and with it
a sense of the uncanny, from the moment I realized what was happening
in our dialogue.
However one parse that collective experience,
I felt myself in an altered state that extended among us, and
found myself simultaneously thrilled, terrified, and nonchalant
in the condition. I can hardly express the strangeness of feelings
as gossamer as they were dramatic, the utter mingling of the
sacred and profane. The dialogue was holy, my heart opened as
I recognized its miracle, I hung on every word I heard. And also
I picked my nose, chatted with friends, and flirted with a cute
stranger. By 3:00 p.m. or so, though reluctant to leave its enthralling
embrace, I went off with two hundred others to the second floor
of Sproul, to blockade the office of the Dean of Men until he
or some higher administrator would meet with us.
As we jammed the broad public corridor,
our dialogue flared again like a brand brought to tinder, materialized
as a substance we could extend. Here its focus was narrower,
on the tactical situation -- on whom to let enter or leave, whom
to bar, what to demand if ever they'd talk with us -- though
as deeply engaged with the issue of moral action. Thrilled to
find myself again in the presence I had left, the glow, I listened
as the talk ran on and on. As all had claim to speak, we could
rag a point endlessly, but were sensible enough to make slow
progress. We were at it for two hours before the distinguished
faculty group arrived to convince us to leave the building, give
up the car. Gingerly, they explained how they were trying to
mediate the situation, negotiate with the administration "on
your behalf." They felt that many faculty would support
"a reasonable degree of freedom." But nothing could
proceed while we were holding a knife to the administration's
throat, creating chaos, making it impossible for them to do anything.
I joined the dialogue then, as a child
asking naively why it was impossible. They explained over
and over, dodging spirited interjections, until something cracked
open in me. I stood up and simply raved at them for the depth
of their betrayal, their impotence. Where had they been the past
two weeks, the past six years? Why were the men who should have
led us in defense of shared values trailing us instead, pushing
us to back down? Really, I was quite beside myself, out of control,
watching myself raving like a man possessed until I slumped down
hoarse, still trembling with that blast of raw emotion.
Or so I had remembered ever since, until
checking the transcript yesterday. It seems I did scream at one
point, as I taxed them for betrayal. Yet the content of my rave
was surprisingly academic and coherent. "You are treating
this as if it were two weeks old," I said. "This is
not two weeks old, it is . . . six years old. . . . We have been
driven to the first civil disobedience on campus . . . after
a period of six years of having our liberties chopped away one
by one. Of petitioning nicely, of discussing nicely. WHERE HAS
THE FACULTY BEEN DURING ALL THIS?" And I told them where,
ticking off the few, ineffectual highlights of their intervention
in our punishments, and in their own -- including the political
firing of the only professor (of History, Richard Drinnon)
who had stood with us at the lonely gates of San Quentin. (6)
Those sharing Lewis Feuer's view of the
FSM as an adolescent rebellion driven by darkly Freudian forces
may well find paydirt in the depth of my cry of abandonment,
my grief and rage at the absence of fathers to respect. As those
feelings echo still in my maturity, I can hardly object, or pass
my outburst off as only a sane response to the typical failures
of liberal intellectuals in that era. Yet it makes as much sense
to say that Clio seized me in the instant I spoke of Drinnon,
the Muse of History focussing my role in the broader stream of
spirit coursing through us. Whatever the species of energy, I
opened to a tremendous bolt that propelled me relentlessly, its
agenda already precisely announced. Yet all was still implicit;
I had no sense yet of mission beyond my commitment to whatever
might come of our desperate affirmation. (7)
Since we refused to budge before direct
negotiations with the administration began, the professors withdrew,
and our talk resumed until campus police arrived to close Sproul
Hall early, breaking another tradition. We rushed downstairs
to jam the doorway, and held it open until the cops tired of
wrenching us apart. Soon after, we voted to leave anyway, as
they had sealed off the upper floors; and rejoined our comrades
around the podium of the car, in the glow of public dialogue.
Years later, I came to write about the
peculiar properties of such open circles of testament and decision,
in which all may speak with equal authority and everything pertinent
may be considered. (8) To identify them simply as democratic
forms is misleading, for their characteristic textures and dynamics
of content and participaction are quite different from more usual
forms of democratic discussion structured by moderation and linear
argument. So too are the effects on their participants, both
severally and together, in ways verging toward the transpersonal
in at least a metaphorical sense. When they work, from a disorderly
anarchy of contributions a self-organizing coherence emerges,
in content and persons both, too multi-dimensional to describe
simply. (9)
Such forums were vital to the FSM from
then on, particularly in its inner workings. Indeed, the experience
of this one was so vivid and compelling that it set the tone
of the movement that emerged, and began a tradition of "open
microphone" that distinguished crisis politics and organizational
workings in Berkeley for decades thereafter. Yet surely this
one was unique in the sheer novelty of the experience of direct
democracy, as in the surreal theater of our encampment, the heightened
sense of danger and meaning.
And so I found myself among a spontaneous
polity engaged in the raw act of self-governance, of self-creation,
crystallizing through its open dialogue. Periodically we paused
to vote on this or that, as a thousand informed and independent
minds, in what the media, administrators, and even our professors
could recognize only as a "mob scene." And then resumed,
as the long moment without resolution stretched on with no sign
of when or if they'd talk with us or when the cops would descend.
In an existential daze of adrenaline and wonder and whatever
else was coursing through me, I listened as speaker after speaker
mounted the car to extend the dialogue with perspectives of Constitutional
law, mythology, local politics, of hope and fear. And running
through all this were bits and threads of our history. I think
I took no special note of them as such in the flow, but surely
I was attuned to them, if only because I was among the relatively-few
there with experience to appreciate their constellation.
Ours was a living history, too recent
and marginal and local to be well-recorded, borne mainly in oral
tradition, in the patchwork of stories our veterans remembered
and retold -- about the rebirth of social activism at Berkeley
after the despair of the Fifties, and how the university administration
had tried to contain and abort it. Though thousands of students
had woven themselves recently into this history in Civil Rights
demonstrations, its long contour and the inner story of struggle
for civil liberty remained almost the private memory of a handful
of veterans until we began to share it from atop the car. Our
history became our property in a newly public way, for a larger
we, as we began to tell the stories again and bring them
up to date. As much as our sharing of ideas and the urgencies
of the moment, I think this sharing of history -- and the very
consciousness of history -- helped to knit us into community
and polity.
Little beyond the very recent was shared
that day or the next, as our focus was so immediate. The effect
was mainly to make the newly-inducted aware there was
a history that they were extending. And even this sense dissolved
in the moment, as midnight passed and we focussed on crisis within
the crisis. Hundreds of drunken fraternity boys had joined the
throng surrounding our jammed, seated ranks to shower lit cigarettes
on us, Jew-bait the student body vice-president, and chant for
our blood as the blue goons of the Sheriff's Department egged
them on. For me as for many, to watch Mario hoarsely appealing
to reason from atop the car was both to witness heart-rending
futility, and to expand with awe in the presence of an archetype
taken substance in funky reality, absorbing in some degree the
signature of its energy. The memory will burn until I die. The
surge of threat did not recede until a priest climbed the car
to tell them that so much hate leads to murder, and to go home.
The small rain of fire faded out as we sat silent half an hour
until they left. And then our dialogue resumed.
I don't recall if it was soon before
this or after that I removed my shoes to take my own turn atop
the car, with what had coiled within. Surely the need to contribute
whatever I could throbbed in me, as in so many there and later.
But perhaps it was merely private ego that led me to put my name
on the speakers' list -- and coincidence that I could think of
nothing more pertinent to contribute beyond what others had already.
"This didn't begin two weeks ago," I said, mainly to
my juniors there, concerned that they understand our pent justification
in protesting, and how badly the deck was stacked against us.
"There's a history, it's been going on for six years and
more." And went on to note as many highlights as I could
so briefly, of the long assault on the civil liberty of our evolving
activism, before my five minutes were up and I stepped down,
with so much unsaid still inside. Soon after, I ducked away to
fetch my sleeping-bag from home, and returned to listen until
the dialogue suspended and I fell into brief sleep.
******
I have written elsewhere of the next
day. (10) From dawn to dusk our dialogue proceeded in that phantasmagorical
theater, as we waited for word of negotiation while thousands
of spectators gathered round us and cops from ten jurisdictions
converged. It was Indian summer, we were sweltering, spacey.
As light blazed from the Greek columns of Sproul's facade, the
Plaza shimmered and we found ourselves in the agora of Athens,
huddled in the cradle of democracy, riveted on every word. Yet
all we could see was our familiar selves, sweating, stuttering,
with no language but metaphor to grasp what was coursing through
us.
Years earlier, after the HUAC demonstrations,
while recording a prophesy of the rise of the New Left, (11)
I had written, "It is one thing to say that we are living
in the middle of history; everyone is aware of this. It is quite
another to know that this is so, to participate in actions
that one knows are in the growing-bud of the historical tree."
This time the feeling was even more so -- again, a sensate apprehension
rather than an intellectual perception, forming so deeply before
words that I had no sense of history as such, but only of the
extraordinary moment of now stretching on and on through
our dialogue, until word came that the cops were gearing to descend.
Doubtless, many references were made that day to our history,
but I imagine I gave them no more note than any others, for all
were vital, surcharged. In the deepening twilight, as we prepared
for attack, I felt hope and despair flicker in wild oscillation.
I thought someone would be killed, I trusted it wouldn't be me.
At what seemed the last moment, Mario mounted the car to announce
the apparent compromise reached with President Kerr, conscience-stricken
because we hadn't yet been given the chance to approve its terms.
We'd give up the car, Jack would be released, the suspensions
of our leaders would be put to fair tribunal, and a tripartite
committee would study the issue of regulation of student political
activity to make recommendations to the administration. Though
many beside myself were so torn by mistrust of the offered process
that they would have stayed on, together we accepted this as
enough for now and voted to leave, dispersing exhausted, glowing,
charged.
Though the moment's peril had dissolved,
nothing had been resolved, and not simply in the formal sense
of issues pending in committee. Whatever energy had possessed
us in that crucible, its signature and momentum were full-fledged;
and the moment of extraordinary reality went on as the ordinary
clock went round. From that point on, the entire drama of the
FSM unfolded with the sense of Greek inexorability remarked on
by so many of its literate participants. I couldn't tell how
many others felt the sense of uncanniness how deeply, or felt
with me like characters in Attic tragedy, playing our free parts,
as only our uncertain selves, in a mythic script that we already
knew by heart. (12**) Soon after the climax, I ventured that
we had committed ourselves around the car not simply to a cause
but to the creation and completion of an Event whose dimensions
we could scarcely understand; and argued more comprehensibly,
in some detail, that every theme and dynamic of the long conflict
were already preconfigured in this opening act. (13) I still
have no language for that mind-wrenching simultaneity of destiny
and free will. But no account of contingent history, howsoever
convincing, will explain the origin of the feeling, or why it
persisted through the whole episode.
[The Private
Process of the Report]
Hardly an hour before the end, Karen
threaded her way through fear to join me beside the car. I had
seen her only off and on since we broke up the previous year,
and was as startled as grateful, since she was so distant from
activism that she wouldn't even walk a picket line. After the
anticlimax, she steered me in silence through nightfall to my
apartment, holding shaky hands; plonked me on the bed, made tea,
and pleaded, "What's going on? Tell me what's happening,"
fierce and forlorn.
I opened my mouth and broke down sobbing,
gasped to recover and sobbed again. She knew so little even of
the last two weeks; how to explain what had been going on and
where it had come to? Still I tried, in clots of coherence between
the tears. I don't know where I started or how much I covered
how, as she listened, eyes wide as mine, trying to grasp the
sense. I went on and on till Aphrodite took pity and she folded
me in her arms and we made love, and sank into the well of dream.
By noon she left. Across town, my old
and new comrades were gathering to work out the formal structure
of the movement of our desire, mechanisms to harness direct democracy
to its task. I ached to join them, but I was beside myself, torn
open, bursting with all that had crystallized around the car,
the energy, the history, our extraordinary presence. After making
an outline, I turned on the tape recorder. "I'm making this
tape because some participant journalism is needed, of a kind
we've never had," I began, and went on for an hour and half.
Given that I was a young man wildly excited,
setting out to describe the amazing prolonged event he had just
been through, the result was rather academic in content, if not
in its textures of feeling. Reaching back to the Fifties, I recalled
our movement's struggle for civil liberty for half an hour and
more, touching on as many key events and dynamics as systematically
as I could while being swept with tears as I lived them through
again; and even as I came to the last two weeks, the last two
days, kept infolding the past in my account of the moment that
still went on. Though the earlier parts of the tape transcript
were most heavily edited before its later publication, enough
detail remains to show how fully my account prefigured the agenda
of the Report that was to come. (14)
That next week, the campus was abuzz
with people looking to connect and be useful, in between trying
to reconnect with ordinary life. The weekend convention that
named our movement had already mapped some of its channels. After
my Monday classes, I went to the Teaching Assistants' caucus
forming in the Statistics Department, and was elected as a representative
to the newly-organizing Graduate Coordinate Committee. In the
GCC's early meetings, besides arguing for the wing that favored
militancy, I proposed that we research and publish the conflict's
fuller history as a useful, immediate project. Thousands had
been energized by the confrontation; to inform them was to make
them more fully ours. And also this committee was to convene
to work out the issue. The coherent record of our repression
was crucial evidence to place upon the table, and to show the
world. What could be clearer? Surely a caucus in the History
Department could take it on?
Though sympathy may have been wider than
I recognized, I might as well have proposed to a wall, for everyone
was already committed to affairs of more immediate consequence.
Disappointed, I faced the stern dictum that ruled throughout
the FSM -- if you think it's worth doing, get to it yourself
-- and went home to begin, stepping back from the front of collective
process so abruptly that I can't recall how I passed on my responsibility
as a T.A. representative.
For a week or more, I toiled alone, locked
in my room, breaking only to tend my classes as a T.A. and to
check with friends and the Daily Cal about what was happening,
as the ambiguous betrayals of the compromise were revealed and
focii of activism continued to condense in our widening community.
Each time, it was agonizing to wrench myself away from the immediacy
and urgency of the present, the replenishment of comradeship,
to engage the ghostly past . But I couldn't help it. Wired with
late caffein and whatever else, I was burning, not simply with
a line of argument but with the staggering richness and complexity
of the whole history it ran through, all I could grasp.
Faced with the problem of how to argue
the case beyond our partisan crowd, to an intelligent and skeptical
community, I fumbled my way towards a functional analysis in
terms of effects on organizations, communication, and leadership,
through which one could understand not only the occasional dramatic
edicts and tampering, but the University's entire pattern of
student governance during this era, by mostly well-meaning and
liberal administrators, as a methodical repression of the New
Left's burgeoning activism. I say "fumbled towards"
because that's how it felt, struggling with paper. Yet it's clear
that the bones of this analysis were already fully formed in
my taped account, and they may well have been stated as I spoke
atop the car. This thesis and analytic perspective became the
basis of the public bulletins I later wrote to recruit and orient
volunteers for the Report project; and of internal guides to
content and methodology for researchers in several areas. They
remained the basis for my covering essay in the published Report,
as well as for selection of the studies it included, though the
simple clarity of the perspective is somewhat blurred there by
other material and the wealth of detail.
For detail there was, indeed. By the
time I made my last outline, ten days into the public project,
it ran for fourteen pages in tiny script, setting out the developmental
history and character of what had been repressed, and a defensible
perspective, before turning to methodical survey of the history
and effect of administrative regulation on each separate strand
of our activity. Looking back, the study proposed by this outline
seems as grandiose as it does logical and minimal. To carry it
through properly would have taken an adequate scholar at least
five years, with help from many.
Well before the outline got to this stage,
the task blew me away. On October 16 or so, I looked in despair
at the disorderly sheaf of typescript in single-spaced elite
type on cockle bond, the maze of beginnings I'd made to explain
this theme, that progression, this crux. Too much! I just couldn't!
The clock was ticking, the reconstituted Campus Committee on
Political Activity (CCPA) was preparing to meet. I gave up, and
went to ask for help.
Nineteen days later, a group of over
220 volunteers had researched and published Administrative
Pressures and Student Political Activity at the University of
California: A Prelimary Report -- amounting to 145
pages and some 65,000 words, including twenty of the forty-three
studies brought to first completion -- and submitted it to the
CCPA as the FSM's brief. Almost overnight, our case had acquired
a broad historical context and grounding -- and I had acquired
a reputation as an inspired organizer, which helped move me quickly
through the FSM's organizational structure to its Steering Committee.
[The Public
Process of the Report]
Seeking help, I turned first to old comrades,
my political peers and elders. They were mostly from SLATE, the
small umbrella that had sheltered most of our activism before
1961, when the Administration effectively severed its campus
ties. They remembered much more about this and other travails
than I did. But of course almost all were either off campus in
other lives, or too busy already in the conflict to attend to
old history. Though some offered gladly to sit still for interviews,
if interviewers could be found.
So I turned for help mostly to younger
people who knew less, and found them prepared to learn and do
more. The cop-car seige had galvanized the campus, there were
hundreds, perhaps thousands looking for ways to participate,
to belong by the gift of purposeful work to what was happening
-- which was not simply "a civil liberties protest,"
but something involving our deeper senses of autonomy, identity,
and purpose. What was striking was not how many had already been
activists but rather how many had not been, recently or ever.
For the campus community always holds many people with social
sympathies who aren't doing anything in particular, anything
that would take attention and energy from their ordinary routines,
to act on them. The FSM was remarkable in providing so many a
chance and vehicle for active participation.
This agitated mixture of the already
active and the newly activated was the raw material, the resource-pool
from which emerged the dozens of autonomous work-groups that
formed the movement's functional structure. In this climate of
awakened commitment, wherever needs were recognized people gathered
to try to meet them, forming Legal Central, Press Correction
Central, the Newsletter Committee, departmental caucuses -- and
off in another corner, for seventeen frantic days, the "repression
report committee," or whatever it was called, for we had
no time to choose a name.
After checking out the Old Guard, I kept
asking for help. I asked my sister Deborah, my "apolitical"
friends, fellow grad students in the math department, fellow
poets around the literary magazine, strangers sitting in the
cafeteria with FSM buttons and friendly faces. Sometimes I asked
them to ask their friends, to think of others who might want
to get involved; but usually I didn't need to, for their thoughts
were ahead of mine. I went also to promising public venues --
the GCC meeting, the gathering where the unaffiliated students
were organizing as Independents. All I recall saying each time
was: This needs doing, do you want to help? But surely
I must have talked a blue streak. (15)
The need was as uncertain as it was clear.
Our present struggle had a background that should be made explicit,
as one prerequisite to conducting responsible political business
in what we still thought of as an intellectual community, rather
than a managerial slum where force ruled. If the Report could
be completed in time, it might strengthen the FSM's case in the
study committee's proceedings. Though of course the CCPA was
only advisory to the real rule-makers.
People responded to this long-shot as
they did all through the FSM. On Steering Committee, sometimes
when something needed doing we'd break from meeting and go to
campus to find people with FSM buttons, explaining what and why.
If they didn't agree or it didn't suit their fancy -- well, tough;
the FSM wasn't a membership organization, we had no power to
direct anyone. But if they did agree or thought similarly, they
would not simply "do the job" but would transform the
task, reshaping it as their own as they devoted their unique
energies and creativity to it, often enough in ways we'd never
anticipated. And so it was with the Report. Like each other work
of the FSM, it was a collective task freely organized by its
participants. Each did what she chose, bit off her own piece
of the task, a piece she hoped would be to her taste and no more
than she could handle or get help with. For there was so much
to do: deciding what to report and who would take it on, finding
information through print and people, writing and editing all
the particular reports, keeping track of who was doing (or not
doing) what and when it should come in, squirreling stencils
away for the printing job, bringing food to meetings and beer
to the collating party, distributing the completed Report.
Early on, at the Independents' meeting,
Lynne Hollander joined me, a senior in English at 23 with no
relevant preparation, to take on the Herculean task of editorial
coordination among a dispersed network of researchers and writers
that soon involved over ninety people. She recruited her former
lover to report on the disenfranchisement of the graduate students;
and he recruited his; and so it went, as impulse propagated in
chain reaction and folks we'd never heard of started calling
in.
On October 18, I went to the meeting
of FSM's Executive Committee to announce the project and ask
for help in publishing the Report. (16**) Rumour had come already,
and quickly spread, for representatives of every organization
involved were there. Two days later, thousands must have known
that some group had taken on the project. The effect was less
to bring an avalanche of volunteers, than to affirm and deepen
the movement's collective sense of purpose, dignity, and justification
-- and of history itself in the making.
By then, the FSM's communication needs
had spawned a ragtag publishing empire in a basement, with the
donated mimeograph machines and letter-press that cranked out
four million pages of leaflets and newsletters in constant, last-minute
production. Press Central's story was as rich and idiosyncratic
as the story of this report, and as so many more; if the FSM's
full history could be written, it would fill a long shelf. There
I met Thom Irwin and Marston Schultz -- students in landscape
architecture and architecture at 23 and 22, though Thom had dropped
out to study via University Extension -- who began organizing
others for the task of rush publication barely two weeks ahead,
or rather for the travail, for our mechanisms of publishing were
so primitive and laborious in that era. (17)
By eve of the next day, Press Central
had printed the first "Confused Poop Sheet for Research
on Repression at Berkeley" -- three single-spaced, tight-margined
mimeo pages, an invitation sketching the project's scope and
guidelines, listing fifteen topics with ten coordinators to call.
By its second edition, "Confused Poop ... " had become
"Information ..." and had doubled in length and density,
listing forty-one topics and two dozen coordinators, pleading
for others to take on the rest. The third bulletin skipped the
rhetoric to focus on organization and coordination, added twenty-four
topics, and announced a general meeting for that night, October
22, hoping it would draw more volunteers.
That gathering was a carnival, the first
time more than three or four of us had met face-to-face. You
can imagine what we all felt, on looking around the crowded room
to grasp the funky substance and reality of our venture together,
of others on whom we could depend. The room buzzed with enough
energies to carry and blur any sense of the uncanny; I recall
only my feelings of gratitude and hope. In two hours, we whipped
through information, problems, and connections and then dispersed,
since the deadline loomed -- few to full-time labour, most fitting
what they could into as much or little of the rest of life as
they managed to maintain -- leaving Lynne to keep track of their
living maze, nag the tardy, and counsel those with writer's block;
and leaving me, with her assistance, to digest what started coming
in.
Beyond responding to scattered calls
for advice or connections, I had no contact with researchers
or writers in the field. Collectively, they must have worked
like dogs, an anarchic sledge-team. By ten days later, most of
what we'd get had arrived, some through relays of editors. The
heap totaled some seventy documents in six hundred pages -- ranging
in size from brief affidavit of what several heard the Chancellor
say to a fifty-nine page treatment of the local Civil Rights
movement; in character from dense source interviews with SLATEniks
to clumsy summaries of secondary accounts; in quality from this
to competent study of the campaign against compulsory military
training; reaching back to the Loyalty Oath controversy and afield
to the University's suppression of research on its relation with
agribusiness, and its collusion in siting a nuclear reactor on
an earthquake fault.
All had been authorized by our "central
committee," i.e. by me and/or Lynne and whoever else was
around when people came with proposals. In practice, we approved
everything, saying, "Fine, go to it," offering whatever
we could to help shape or refine it -- for every time someone
said, "This needs doing and I'm willing," the topic
was indeed worth pursuing. We had to trust that folks could carry
through, and most managed a decent approximation, with a little
help from their friends. Had we had more time, we might better
have prioritized their work, and done more editing. Only a fraction
of the full terrain was covered yet, even skimpily, let alone
digested. But it was time to punt, or throw our pass.
I sorted through the heap with Lynne,
triaging the documents' competence and pertinence against the
strong constraint on how massive a work could be published. For
a week, I'd been drafting the overview essay from my earlier
work, summarizing the detailed logic of our historical case with
specific references, re-drafting as more contributions arrived.
Finally our triaging and my draft converged, in sixty footnotes
tying it to a supporting text of twenty reports, and we sent
this too to the printers on November 2.
From our standpoint, it was magical:
Couriers were called to take the raw, edit-scrawled manuscripts
to Press Central, and neat piles of pages appeared at the collating
party two days later. Long after, Thom told me what that entailed.
He and Marston had recruited an on-call force of forty typists,
forty couriers, and near as many others to staff round-the-clock
shifts coordinating them. As the typed masters came in, they
went out again to yet others standing ready at hand-cranked ditto
machines, phoning in when they were free for use. Since these
were more common and accessible on campus than mimeos, it's not
clear that our misguided choice of this medium made printing
more difficult. (18) But certainly the process was dramatic,
with people diving out of office windows to huddle and return,
dodging the campus cops.
As published by the only means at our
disposal -- manual typewriters and secretarial Selectrics, and
the ditto machines used for routine departmental bulletins, lent
to us by sympathetic staff -- the Report's supporting texts amounted
to 137 pages of single-spaced typescript with narrow margins
in a variety of typefaces, often changing within a document,
all printed in the pale violet ink of ditto transfer, legible
but taxing to read. Only the seven-page overview essay was sharply
clear, printed in competent offset on the FSM's own press.
By late morning on November 4, the collating
party began. Our exuberant crew punched holes in 30,000 sheets,
collated them page by page, and bound the sheaves in manila folders
with pockets, securing each with three bright brass clips after
the overview essay was laid in. Having stretched the ditto masters
to their max, we distributed the faintest sheets as fairly as
we could -- after reserving the best for ten presentation copies
-- and wound up with about two hundred copies of the whole. Two
went to each of the forty-some organizations represented on the
FSM's Executive Committee. Most of the rest went to sympathetic
faculty in key departments and to various campus libraries; a
few to the outside world as to the administration, including
copies to President Kerr and the Regents. The overview essay
was distributed much more widely; we must have sold two thousand
copies for a quarter each at the FSM's tables, and given away
half again as many, blanketing professors' mailboxes in every
department, and our own constituency as well as we could.
Late that afternoon, we brought ten copies
of the full Report -- several for each negotiating team -- to
the FSM's representatives, just in time to present at the CCPA's
fifth meeting. As each weighed nearly two pounds, we imagined
their satisfying thump! on the conference table. In the
minutes of that intensely-focussed discussion, beginning to clarify
the key regulatory issue, no mention of the Report appears. Three
days later, the committee deadlocked and was dissolved by the
Chancellor, as the FSM began direct action again.
[The Effects
of the Report]
So what did all our effort come to? I
doubt that anyone besides myself read the entire Report that
fall, or during the next thirty-five years, if ever. Indeed,
I doubt that anyone besides Lynne and one unfortunate aide to
President Kerr read very much of it then, and not simply because
copies were scarce and faint. Surely some hundreds of young activists
read portions of those that passed into organizations, eager
to catch up on certain issues; and probably some faculty and
administrators browsed theirs to check the texture and content
of our evidence. But who had time and motivation for more than
this -- and reading its brief overview -- while events were sweeping
us on so dramatically?
After that, the Report became even more
dated and incomplete, an academic curiosity almost lost to history's
archaeology. Most copies probably still survive, tucked away
in motley personal archives of the engagements of our youth,
long unseen. A few and then very few persisted in libraries,
hardly accessible even there, their content becoming of piecemeal
interest only to a few specialized scholars. Perhaps these were
occasionally consulted, but I have seen no evidence in print
more specific than three token citations in exhaustive source
lists. (19) Indeed, the very fact of the Report project essentially
vanished from historical recall. So far as I know, only two laconic
references appeared in all that has been published about the
FSM -- each two sentences long, noting simply that a group following
my lead had been at work on a "massively documented"
report whose overview was widely distributed. (20)
Only since 1999 has the Report's content
become more publicly available, shared on the Web in a joint
project by the Free Speech Movement Archives and the university's
Bancroft Library, assisted crucially by a gift from Stephen Silberstein
-- in an edition augmented by all the other, unpublished material
prepared by our working group, including its bulletins and internal
papers, and the commentary of this memoir. Indeed, since we called
the Report "preliminary" in part because we meant and
had begun to include the FSM's unfolding history in it, the entire
suite of documents from and pertaining to the FSM, placed on
the Web by the joint FSM-A/Bancroft project, may be understood
as the Report's extension.
From the black hole of university administration,
there survives only one document concerning the original Report,
so far as I know -- a response to Kerr's request that it be reviewed
"to determine the historical accuracy of its assertions."
(21) Its author was quite scornful of the work, sputtering with
adjectives: "poorly edited . . . outdated . . . uneven
in quality . . . some prepared by freshmen . . . [not] reliable
or thorough . . . secondary sources . . . misstatements of fact
. . . omissions, misinterpretations, and inadequately supported
generalizations." Need I say, I'm grinning? All this
was true enough, except the last, and I could cheerfully add
a dozen more, conscious from the beginning; for our production
was as slapdash and amateurish as one can imagine, the awkward
form of instantiated love, of Eros, of passion for the truth
of history.
Surely its face was pimpled. Yet it's
not enough to say, "Hey, give us a break; we pulled off
a practical miracle, doing it as best we could." For also
we were talented, thoughtful and competent, as well as inspired,
and we did a decent job of it, leaving a body of material that
will long be of value to scholars, and through them perhaps to
others -- a rich slice of a history too complex for any work
to encompass, as democratic as its subject, bearing some sense
of the whole. As for our purpose then, it is notable that Kerr's
reviewer, despite his adjectives, completely dodged the issue
of the accuracy of our assertions, acknowledging the problem
tacitly by noting that at least nine of the Report's studies
had been farmed out for further study. The real problem was perhaps
more visible in his conclusion that "even a comprehensive
commentary . . . would only stimulate a continuing, endless,
and ultimately unsatisfactory dialogue," which was of course
the attitude that infuriated us.
But others then were more attentive,
if closely only to the Report's similarly-titled overview. For
to this day, that summary remains as forceful, coherent, and
sound as our grasp then of the affair, and as compact -- dry
as dust almost, marshalling fact after fact to document the university's
stifling of our dissent, and of dissent within itself, coming
even then to climax. The 5,000 copies we published were read
by probably twice as many among us within the week, from start
to the last footnote, being scarcely longer than three ordinary
FSM leaflets together and much better printed. I don't know that
this changed many students' minds or added, other than in piecemeal
fashion, to their senses of local history and justification;
but many learned more clearly about how power works in our bureaucratized
world.
Beyond them, the overview's reception
varied. The police-car dialogue had already made students widely
aware that a long history of grievance underlay the struggle
for political expression. Though a few (lower) administrators
had understood this sympathetically, most had heard the radicals'
perennial complaints of oppression as ungrateful noise confusing
the progress of true liberalization, if not as more pernicious;
and had little interest in a corrective text. The faculty were
still so insulated even from concern for student activism, let
along from knowledge of the actual textures of our institutional
experience, that few had more than an inkling that a historical
case might be made for our stance. That many read the overview
left in their mailboxes and found it coherent may have contributed
modestly towards the overwhelming majority in our favor in the
Academic Senate vote a month later, though the drama of injustice
by then assured this.
Yet such assessments understate the Report's
accomplishment, for its main import and consequence were symbolic.
From the time rumour spread that someone had taken on the project
to the time news spread that many had delivered, and thereafter,
it filled an ache in consciousness among us, as news of Legal
Central, Press Corrections Central, and so on did. The ache was
in part to know that others had covered each vital base, and
beneath this to know that others like oneself were so empowered,
for this promised one's own power for good. In this respect,
the instant legend of our accomplishment -- the whole history
from an army, almost overnight! -- lent strength to many
and our whole.
Beyond this, the ache was specific. We
ached for our history not only as ammunition; nor merely because
we were intellectuals still, howsoever inflamed, bound to testify
to the importance of its inquiry. We ached for it because it
helped make us whole, as citizens and in our selves. To know,
even distantly, that the massive, historical substance of our
grievance had been recorded and made public by our collectivity
did more than strengthen our senses of justification and power
-- it helped restore us to our selves, in polity and person.
In such unmeasureable senses, I think the Report was at least
well worth our effort, if not a symbolic triumph.
[Of My Further
Trajectory in the FSM]
Soon after the Report's publication,
as I recall, Lynne and I were given non-voting seats on the FSM's
Executive Committee, in tribute to its perceived importance and
its work-force. On November 14, I was been elected from there
to the Steering Committee in its final reconstitution, in part
because I stood somewhat outside a current polarization.
Well before, perhaps even before publication
day, the process of my induction on Steering Committee had begun,
on my initiative. I was itching for the Report to be done so
that I could offer what else I could to our goings-on. All I
had to give, beyond my body and wit, was my skill as a writer.
Disturbed by the strident tones of the FSM's leaflets, I volunteered
to rewrite them before they went out, and after one trial was
invited to continue. Naturally, I had to sit through the long
meetings, to grasp what I was to digest. There I found myself
accepted equally in an intense, collective dialogue, selectively
indifferent to formal bounds. In such way, several others --
most notably, perhaps, the young Protestant theologian Walt Herbert
--were effectively drafted onto the FSM's vanguard body, by a
process at once quite undemocratic and quite consensual. Of course
the formalities were observed: Steering Committee was entitled
to host consultants, and we had no vote. But in practice, the
distinction was nearly trivial in a dialogue that decided by
consensus. And soon enough it vanished for me.
And thus I came to be the main writer
of the FSM's official propaganda, or at least its leaflets, for
the conflict's five final weeks. In this employ, I learned more
about how much power he has, who writes the final draft at 4
a.m. Yet I swear I spoke for us all, as well as I was able: my
phrasings were rarely rebuked by my comrades, though sometimes
sharpened. As for what other role I played, in a variously-divided
colleagueship that met for many hours almost daily during this
time, only its public face was apparent, in the few speeches
I gave at rallies. My inner role remains an elusive elephant,
limned by a few nearby commentators as sighted and blind as I.
One accounts me a moralist, another a clown, another a romantic
nihilist, another merely a crashing bore, and others simply as
minor. I'm sure I was all of those and more, as was the Report;
and perhaps the group's chief mystic too, though one other among
us might qualify. If so, it can hardly be blamed on psychedelics
alone, since at least five of our elected dozen had used marijuana
and at least one other LSD by then. Such uses, as I suggest earlier,
had some influence within what actually happened in that intense
company, as in our larger ensemble, as well as on my perception
of these.
All I know for sure, even now, is that
our radically diverse personalities and perspectives were fused
for a long moment in some transcendent harmony within the appearance
of our differences, that left us fully our selves as its use
made us more deeply so. It was real, there was discord, misunderstanding,
and bitterness among us as well as love; and it was also magical,
in the true spirit of Democracy.
Of this, just one thing more. I've made
my progression to Steering Committee seem quite natural and logical.
Perhaps it testifies only to my ego and drive for power and stature,
though I've hardly lived life that way. But what drove me, though
selfish enough, was a deeper hunger, almost beyond words. Around
the car, I had felt a glow of a distinct species of energy.
I would not come to be able to speak even so vaguely of the feeling
for some years, but even then it was clear and called me. After
we dispersed, I felt like a blind worm seeking the touch of light,
and burrowed with all my being towards where I felt it most strongly,
in the collective crucible that Mario stirred. Of my experience
there, I hope some day to grasp and write more. Till then, this
will remain my overriding sense of the journey.
[Of Making
History]
Later, when I came to speak of the project,
almost all I could (or chose to) recall was the amazing, concentrated
blaze of collective effort that produced the Report. This is
how I recorded the story, two and then three decades later in
unfinished memoirs, as a miniature of the FSM, minus only the
infighting. Focussing on the sociology of the process, I reduced
my earlier role -- my talk from the car, to Karen, the tape-recorder,
the typewriter -- to a dozen lines of almost-perfunctory summary,
as if I had been simply an accidental catalyst; and treated my
role thereafter in hardly more detail or emphasis, as largely
titular.
In such forgetfulness or deception, I
was moved by what might be called a political commitment, if
not a counter-narcissistic drive, of a kind that led political
poster artists from the mid-Sixties long onward to issue their
work unsigned. The drive is not simply to repress unseemly display
of personal ego and private pride, but to affirm and testify
to transcendent reality, the vital power of democratic collectivity.
It is easy to mock the idea of "the spirit of the collective,"
and scarcely more difficult to trace its recurrence in various
phrasings throughout the vast tapestry of participant accounts
of social activism during that era, as formerly and since. But
no language yet serves to express what the phrasings grope at,
the peculiar state in which one finds oneself both actor and
agent, wholly and only oneself yet simultaneously selfless,
a vehicle of common, "higher" will. Even to call it
"collective" is already half to lie, but we keep trying.
All we can grasp clearly is the practical, life-furthering power
of collective action, and even this we confuse with mass
as we push the idea.
And so I came -- as even a more scrupulous
and self-aware historian must, albeit in grosser degree -- nearly
consciously to deform the history I wrote, both in content and
in slant, to serve a well-meant political agenda and urge. So
nearly as I could without lying outright, I found myself straining
subliminally to present the Report's effort as collective, not
only in its outer mechanics but to the core; and was somewhat
pleased by the result, as by the memory. I pardoned the slanting
I recognized because it testified to deeper truth, for the experiences
that sandwiched this one -- the two days around the car, my month
in the intense dialogue of Steering Committee, the FSM itself
-- were supernally collective. Yet even so, I was also lying,
not least to myself.
When the editors of this anthology invited
me in 1999 to contribute, of course I chose this story. Since
I thought my memoir already nearly complete, I expected to spend
only a few days tidying it up, but conscience intervened. As
an editor myself, I had recently recognized how remarkably driven
the Report's key organizer had been, but scarcely more than this.
Even so, the point seemed important to the account, and I sat
back to explore it -- focussing on my own history, feelings,
and perceptions, including some I have long fumbled to express.
I was surprised to recognize how early I put forth the Report's
agenda, how long I'd been preparing, how thoroughly I dominated
its production, how unerring and uncanny was the bolt of energy
that drove me. Standing now with the specificity of my role
so fully exposed, I feel almost foolish. Who was I kidding? Would
there have been a Rossman Report without Rossman? Who was this
"selfless" fool?
For decades, the historian Reggie Zelnik
and I have argued politely about contingent history. Would there
have been a Free Speech Movement without Mario Savio? There would
surely have been something. Reggie thinks it would have been
quite different, and likely much less effective. I have thought
that not even Mario, nor the ravaged Chancellor Strong, was irreplaceable
once the affair began -- that given the tensions and energies
represented so widely and deeply on all sides, something of equivalent
sort and consequence was bound to result, as if in fated theater.
(22)
In this view, moved by the same political
agenda and spirit, I have less stood aside than leaned outward
from my certain knowledge of Mario's uniqueness and importance
to the FSM. From the moment I witnessed him speak from the car,
before any word of how he was regarded, I knew him as an extraordinary
presence within our extraordinary presence, in a way that went
to the heart and only deepened as that drama climaxed, as he
went on in public blaze, as we talked together for endless hours
in Steering Committee, in jail, in our sporadic, intense friendship
till his death. There are real saints, and he was one, in his
quirky, tortured humanity; I have known others, not near as closely.
In terms pregnant in this memoir, Mario was an avatar,
embodying a transcendental signature and force. Insofar as the
spirits of Democracy and Liberty flowed through us, he was their
brightest conduit, our crooked lightning-rod, and everyone knew
it. How can what happened be imagined without him? Yet in my
leaning so, I am moved by an equal truth, with which Mario agreed.
For from the first, I was swept with
visceral revulsion and grief at the way the media hastened to
identify and focus on a Leader, transmuting the FSM from an awakened
public to a led mass, in a way that endures to this day in popular
legend and school-texts, reinforced recently by national recognition
of Mario's death. Though one might wish professional historians
to be wiser than this caricature, it persists more subtly in
even the most compassionate treatments of our movement, perhaps
emphasized by this very volume and even by these reflections.
Yet in the largest dramas of the FSM as in the most intimate,
we were cast into an existential democracy in which the contribution
of each person, no matter how "trivial" -- including
the moderates who "betrayed" the movement -- was as
vital to the whole. Though putting it so be romantic, this reality
was attested by the hundreds of practical heroes and heroines
who emerged in the affair, by its vital dependence on them in
innumerable junctures, and by the FSM's subsequent reputation
as the most participant-democratic movement of its era. To have
this be its leading memory and legend, rather than the image
of Mario as Leader (or even as Avatar), seems more nearly true
in fact as well as spirit, and more healthy in its teaching.
May he remain as he was, the brightest star in our bright constellation.
As for the Report, the argument here
for contingent history is even stronger than in Mario's case,
and simpler. It seems that I dreamed the whole thing up after
spending my adult lifetime preparing, clapped my hands, and watched
an army spring forth to materialize my fantasy -- or less grandly,
that I was a uniquely qualified and driven organizer, mildly
charismatic if not divinely inspired. How could the Report have
been, without me?
Having put Reggie's case so strongly,
I am reduced to metaphor for reply, beyond the clarity of certain
background facts. There were probably forty SLATE veterans around
with more extensive and intimate experience of our history, many
more disposed by academic training than I to take on such a task.
Nor was one necessary, given the broader pool of people with
such bents, for the history was essentially as I found it rather
than as I construed it, and as accessible in a community opened
to connection. Had anyone else of even moderate capacity, drive,
and friendships engaged it, they would as readily have found
partners for so meaningful a task among so many aching to be
useful, and traced the same terrain. My guiding list of topics
was merely a first draft of common knowledge and assessment,
soon fleshed out by others' suggestions, as would have happened
with anyone as partisan starting to inquire. As for the analytical
framework sprung like Minerva from my brow, and the Report's
attempted tones of reason, method, and dispassion, what can I
say but that the analysis was primitive, primal, involving no
more than a practical understanding of this theme of our experience,
which any serious inquiry would duplicate; and that the tones
were shaped in deference to the common manners and ideals of
our larger community. If no one griped about the slants, tones,
and contents of my directives and the emerging product, this
was less because I was inspired or dictatorial than because these
did indeed represent our common understanding. In such senses,
the Report project was even more collective and my role even
more selfless than I had portrayed. At most, I can claim the
prose-style of the covering essay to be my own, though the tone's
so dry it hardly sounds like me.
In sum, I see no way to contend that
I was essential to the Report, save to posit that no one else
would have taken it on if I had not. Lord knows, that's how I
felt, as did hundreds of others at their self-chosen tasks. Yet
this contention is hardly credible, at best unlikely, given the
wide, instant recognition of the project's importance among the
company of so many talented and imaginative people seeking to
be useful. (23) Had any other been Clio's catalyst in this affair,
the idiosyncratic history of their preparation would in retrospect
have seemed as logical and compelling as mine. Yet even so, I
was vital, in all my specificity. How can this be, to be vital
and not be? Was even Mario so?
When the great charges gather in the
clouds, they find their way to ground. The path of lightning
is always specific and contingent, depending irreproducibly upon
the actual history and subtle properties of each molecule it
inflames; and so is the consequence, but only in whether wildfire
flare in this forest or in that. Sometimes it's a sure bet where
and when, the question remaining as to the precise moment and
which tree will kindle first -- the tallest being the most likely;
without it the next tallest, a little less so.
History is always contingent -- contingent
as Kennedy's assassination, contingent as lightning, the irreproducible
logic of each happenstance turn visible in retrospect, realizing
the inexorable logic of its path to ground, the kindled fire.
The tension between these historical logics is a matter of scale
of view, an artifact of single mind; we cannot grasp fully what
works through us and how, though we give it the names of our
age and try. Had Rosa not sat on the bus, nor I undertaken the
Report, would not someone have done something kindred taken by
so many to mean as much? Absent Mario and our FSM, as a common
tide rose in the campuses of this land of conflicted freedom,
would there really not have been some spark as bright to signal
that student youth were entitled and empowered to exercise civil
liberty? That World War I hinged on an assassination has been
debunked, but the trauma of MLK's murder still blurs insight.
Though the Black Plague and Hiroshima seem ever so contingent,
ecology and Mars teach us: If not this way then that, lightning
comes to ground.
Afterwords
These observations proceed from
points marked in my memoir of the Report itself, to consider
the further trajectory of the energy that moved us.
(12**) I couldn't tell how many .
. . felt with me like characters in Attic tragedy, playing our
free parts. . . in a mythic script that we already knew by heart.
Such exotic feelings are hard to articulate,
at best, their dissonances uncomfortable to bear; and are so
generally so quickly repressed as to be lost to historical inquiry.
Even so, they surfaced partially, in the only form we could grasp,
as we joked widely from early on about "the theory of inevitable
administrative atrocity," with growing glee and unease as
it kept proving true. Our role in this dynamic seems mundane,
for the FSM's strategy was to provoke reactions that would build
our movement to the strength to win its ends, and we went about
this consciously as best we could. Yet no account of conscious
agency, whether ours or theirs, can well explain why an experienced
mediator approved a study committee certain to be perceived as
unfair by a mob who had risked their lives the week before, as
Kerr did in implementing the cop-car truce; or why this species
of blunder and active provocation was repeated two months later,
with such exquisite force and timing, at the very moment when
almost all observers thought the FSM was failing, falling apart.
Need I say, we took the administration's gratuitous punishment
of Mario and our other leaders as a malign gift from the gods,
as we geared at last for the climactic sit-in and strike? Some
force beyond our means had moved them to madness, if only the
inexorable logic of their perspective; and made us perfect partners
in this dance, this drama to complete. As we heard the news that
Monday, swept by anger, despair, and exhilaration, I think many
were also touched by awe and a chill of the uncanny as our joking
prophesy of the inevitable proved so true.
Such feelings about the drama and our
own pre-scribed roles attended us more or less consciously, as
each chose freely to improvise his or her part and marched into
Sproul or stayed out to support. They were strongest inside the
building, though impossible to isolate from a general sense of
amazement at participating in that extraordinary reality. From
one angle, we were just a thousand kids driven by desperate affirmation
to "throw ourselves on the gears of the Machine," waiting
to be dragged off to jail. From another, as fully as could be
in twenty hours and one-sixth acre of liberated territory, we
materialized a compact panorama of renewed community, revealed
in the bud of its growth -- an archetype soon to be developed
on larger scale in the Haight-Ashbury before its destruction,
and then more largely and diffusely, as whatever had seized us
resonated and mutated in our peers.
Whether or not such history were prefigured
in Sproul Hall as clearly as I imagine, the tide of energy rising
through us was at full there in its force and signature. Barely
a hundred feet from where we had crammed together in October,
as we crammed together again ordinary time stood suspended again
and we re-entered the extraordinary moment that stretched on
and on, to complete what had been promised around the car. Old
photos of us throwing ourselves on the gears mostly show us static
in some corridor, the cream of the State's (white) youth, casual
and shabby, caught in gesture or rapt or bored as we sprawled
on the grubby floor. No vantage or participant could comprehend
the flickering theater of the whole as we fed each other, sang,
tended the infirm, danced, studied, taught, founded a school,
gave legal counsel, made music, smoked weed, watched movies,
did therapy, courted, made love, held religious service, wrote
poems, published bulletins, celebrated birthdays, plotted, met
in council, voted together, improvised electronic technology,
filling the moment with our life in the play of Liberty, in practice
of Democracy. And through it all our dialogue flickered in a
matrix of public energy -- this time for only fifteen hours before
arrests began, rising now from a dozen independent centers on
four floors, swelling, ebbing, moving down the corridors as one
subject led to another, splitting into smaller swirls, merging,
hushing for the grave hoarse bulletins, the sight of joy. Doubtless,
almost all we said, though literate, was too mundane and trivial
to be worth recording or recall. If a glow that no eye could
see enveloped us and expanded as we spoke, who could tell? We
were wired, scared, heartened by each other's presence, buzzing
with caffein and tension and history in the making, amazed at
our own temerity in forcing a crack of raw novelty in the world
we knew, already averting our gaze from the mystery that opened.
(24)
At my age now, one can hardly be sure
of what is memory and what fancy even in talking of concrete
history -- let alone of what's hard to grasp -- without consulting
some source document. Could the glow be only in my retrospective
imagination? I made no notes at the time. All I can swear to
beside my own driven experience is an impression I recorded soon
after. (25) All commentators then and since have agreed that
the FSM was disintegrating, doomed, after the abortive sit-in
that followed the Regents' refusal of our petition; and ascribe
its "miraculous" revival simply to the abyssmal stupidity
of a punitive administration. As far as I know, I remain the
only one convinced that what flowed through us hardly faltered,
but continued to swell and condense during what only seemed a
demoralizing week, as we waited in eerie confidence for the other
shoe to drop. Perhaps I saw it this way only because I myself
experienced the strange suspended moment from the cop-car siege
through the sit-in and beyond as being continuous between its
dramatic peaks. Perhaps everyone else felt only what the commentators
say, as reason insists and reasonable memory must deduce, looking
back at the objective signposts of the affair. Whatever else
some may have sensed of this, as of an esoteric glow, is likely
lost to recall, leaving me with the aberrant, stubborn consonance
of these impressions.
(16**) I went to . . . FSM's Executive
Committee to . . . ask for help in publishing the Report..
In one sense, ExCom's approval made the
Report an official project of the FSM from then on. Yet its claim
to have been prepared by "an independent group" remained
valid, as the content of our work was subject to no oversight
or approval, and copyrighted by its editors. In a narrower sense,
FSM's sponsorship was equivalent to its role in reproducing the
friendly brief prepared by a sympathetic ACLU chapter, and the
analysis later prepared by "A Fact-Finding Committee of
Graduate Political Scientists." Yet also our group was widely
perceived as an integral agency of a movement that had no formal
boundaries, either of membership or of purpose.
This example points at issues in describing
social movements, which are complicated by the peculiar nature
of the FSM. We did try to keep our eyes and energies on the immediate
prize -- full rights of political expression -- and so historians
have conventionally regarded the movement, in its own self-conception
as narrowly focussed and purposeful. The Report seems to fit
this view neatly. Yet I think it more useful and accurate to
see us as having been broadly seized by a spirit or mania of
participatory democracy, which moved us to constellate in small,
self-directed groups to further its expression. Though much of
this was related to the narrow, formal purpose of the FSM, so
many had been so aroused that their engagements extended naturally
in kindred directions. While organizing as a voice in the conflict,
Teaching Assistants came to consider their own exploitation and
begin a decades-long drive for unionization. Graduates in spontaneous
departmental caucuses focussed also on inequities of treatment
and requirement, and undergraduates began to lobby for neglected
curricula and more independence of study and program. In late
crisis meetings in the dorms, students digressed to consider
lockout rules and sexual segregation, preparing their protest.
A driven researcher produced a pamphlet on the Regents, popularizing
power-structure analysis. Others organized the first classes
of the first "free university," meeting in Sproul's
basement during the final sit-in. In such ways, almost the entire
dimensions of what would soon become a national movement of student-initiated
educational reform, extending into the next decade and on to
affirmative action, were prefigured concretely in the FSM.
In this perspective, the urge to have
a say in our governance expanded immediately from its initial
focus on political citizenship to all aspects of our lives within
the institution of education. Though this expansion was informal,
it was so native and integral that our movement may be seen more
accurately as being of this broad nature, than as having narrow
purpose with some interesting side effects. In this sense, the
catchy precision of the FSM's name continues to obscure its dimensions
and role in that era's theater of movements. At minimum, its
role was as central in catalyzing a movement for educational
reform, and the broader concept of "student power,"
as in the struggle for student civil liberties. This much can
be well-documented; but my surmises go beyond, to what can only
be inferred.
For in broader perspective, the FSM was
most significant in signaling a profound watershed, not simply
of political but of social and cultural change. Howsoever novel
the New Left was, its energy had been developing for seven years
within a traditional framework of concern for Oppressed Others
and Humanity. When this momentum was so sharply frustrated by
our in loco parentis governors, our focus and energy metamorphosed,
as activist young of the privileged class turned for the first
time notably to focus also upon their own conditions of
oppression and desire. From our condition as political citizens,
this reflexive focus spread immediately to our condition as students
and then as learners, as I've said -- but once sprung could scarcely
be bounded, and quickly spread beyond and deeper, to our conditions
as women, as queers, as cripples, as lunatics, as animals in
body and environment, as emotional and communal and spiritual
beings. In the inward turn of this pivotal episode, the traditional
boundaries of politics expanded dramatically, preparing the mutant
curriculum of movements, from countercultural/New Age and ecology
to gender and sexual, that have complemented the racial/ethnic,
peace, and labor movements ever since. (26)
One may safely say that the FSM prefigured
all this symbolically in its dramatic shift of focus, if concretely
only in the case of educational reform. Yet evidence goes somewhat
beyond this. In Berkeley, participants in the first local meetings
of what became the Women's Liberation movement were in fair degree
motivated in reaction to (and enabled by) their experiences in
the FSM -- in which women, though still largely subordinate,
had played radically more forward roles than was usual then even
in the New Left. As the Haight-Ashbury community was condensing,
well before the term "hippie" became public, the impulse
of some pioneers was widely known to derive partly from frustration
with the processes of FSM and Civil Rights activism, and partly
from their energies. To connect such developments directly to
the FSM as wellspring might seem absurd, if the reflexive impulse
that drove it -- to focus on one's own condition -- were not
so consistently carried through in them.
Over the years since, through scattered
personal contacts and memoirs, I have heard enough other stories
from civic architects, feminists, environmental activists, social
planners, and performance artists, akin to the tale of Lee Felsenstein
-- the freshman engineering student whose work in rationalizing
the FSM's communications led him on to design democratic community
information systems, and co-found the legendary Homebrew Club
at the heart of the personal computer revolution -- to suspect
how many more remain untold, of people and groups whose missions
formed during the FSM at least in groping vision and often in
embryonic practice. If their collective story could be assembled,
its diversity would be as remarkable as its mass, largely characterized
by a common drive to make democracy more real and just in its
particular workings. In this way, the movement titled "FSM"
led as concretely as symbolically into many others. To account
its role in educational reform is hardly more difficult than
accounting it simply as a civil liberties movement; but to account
the episode's fuller dimensions as a grounding of democratic
spirit is a daunting task. In part, the difficulty is inherent,
as the real world of human history is no more structured by our
algorithms of taxonomy and interpretation than is the biological
world; but also it is intensified in this instance by the solvent
character of the energy that moved us.
Footnotes
(1) In "Barefoot in a Marshmallow
World" (Ramparts 4:9, Jan. 1966; also in The Wedding
Within the War [WWW], Doubleday, 1971), and in "Looking
Back at the FSM" (in New Age Blues [NAB], E.P. Dutton,
1979; also within "Ten Years Later: Inside the FSM"
in California Monthly, Dec. 1974.)
(2) In particular, the Committee for
Liberal Education tried to publicize processes of administrative
decision that affected students vitally yet were beyond our influence.
(3) See "The Vigil at Chessman's
Execution" (Daily Californian, May 4, 1960; also
in WWW) and "The Protest Against HUAC" (WWW).
(4) "New Faces on the Picket Line",
Occident, Spring 1961.
(5) Though this characterization is
life-long, my experience in the FSM restored and focussed my
appetite for social organizing, leading me during 1966-72 to
be among the principal organizers of the national movement of
student-initiated reform in higher education.
(6) Though the case for Drinnon's dismissal
was more complex than our simplistic assessment credited, his
political activism and lonely prominence in our support were
surely involved.
(7) Two histories note me as one of
four who addressed the spontaneous gathering at Bancroft and
Telegraph on September 16 when the letters banning the tables
were first made known, in the first meeting of what became the
FSM. If so -- which seems plausible, as I had perhaps more residual
stature among activists than my account may suggest -- I soon
forgot even the fact, let alone what I said to the younger folks
there. But it seems likely that I spoke of the history leading
to the ban. If so, this tends more to complete than to contradict
my impression of having been possessed by mission during the
cop-car seige. For I had always wondered why my only (other)
contact with the forming movement was an alienated visit to one
vigil, given my persistent interest in following activist developments.
I could only surmise that I was so demoralized by news of the
ban, and so distanced by not being a formal member of
any affected group, that I simply left protest to others and
followed it in the papers; but this didn't quite make sense.
Given this reminder of my involvement in the very beginning,
it makes even less sense. But another reading seems more coherent:
that I was charged with my odd role as historian from the start,
if only because I felt there that all I had to contribute was
my grasp of history; and that I simply stepped back, at best
dimly aware of what I was doing, to await the time to play my
part further. For although I've portrayed the FSM as being born
around the car, in tribute to the nature of that moment, of course
it was born in the first impulse to contest the ban, with its
signature already determined, to be amplified in that extraordinary
dialogue.
(8) See "The FSM and the Open Circle
Model", esp. pp. 71-72, 76-79, in "Open Space"
in On Learning and Social Change (Random House, 1972);
and "Open Circle Processes," pp. 52-60 in Learning
Games (unpublished mss., c. 1976.)
(9) It's so evident that Mario and some
others played roles of unusual authority in this dialogue, that
its nature might be construed quite differently. Yet it's crucial
to recognize that the authority of each participant was existential,
generated among us on the spot by what sense we found in their
words -- given by our taking them as speaking for ourselves,
wrestling the complexity that surged within each as in us together.
The democracy of open circle process affords equal opportunity
of contribution and respect, yet recognizes differences of merit;
some always will be heard to speak more clearly and sharply for
the whole.
(10) "The Birth of the Free Speech
Movement" in WWW.
(11) Pp. 68-69 in "The Protest
Against HUAC," op. cit.
(12**) This is discussed further in
the Afterwords section below.
(13) "Barefoot in a Marshmallow
World," op. cit.
(14) "The Birth of the Free Speech
Movement," op. cit.
(15) One observer recalls my presentations
at two meetings, in almost identical words, as his most vivid
single impression of the FSM. He portrays me as totally focussed
and clear, speaking with impressive confidence and authority
as I described the project, what should be covered, why and how,
and recruited people for specific roles. (Marston Schultz, oral
communication, 8/12/00) Though others' impressions were surely
less singular and more various, in sum they were probably as
far as his from how I felt in the moment, watching myself go
through my show, and from how I chose to recall myself. I discuss
this disjunction further below.
(16**) This is discussed further in
the Afterwords section below.
(17) Beside expediting the Report, Schultz
had already begun independently to gather the documents of the
conflict, assembling the core of the FSM's archival legacy, enshrined
now in the Bancroft Library. As a Report volunteer, since this
base was covered Laura Murra set out to gather the emerging literature
about the FSM, by this preparing her distinguished role as Laura
X, the magpie archivist of the early years of the emerging feminist
movement. In such ways as in mine, as I later discuss, the spirit
and impulse that seized us together was drawn into specific tendrils
that coiled throughout our affair, binding it into wholeness
and leading to the future.
(18) As the "preliminary"
edition was so half-baked, we felt that being unable to print
many copies would force us to carry through with a second edition,
substantially deeper and sounder. We had no idea of how soon
events would swirl us on.
(19) In the 1965 "Byrne Report," and books by Rorabach
(1989) and Goines (1993).
(20) See Robert Starobin, ""Graduate
Students and the Free Speech Movement," Graduate Student
Journal I:4, Spring 1965, p. 19; Max Heirich, The Spiral
of Conflict (Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 243; and
David Goines, The Free Speech Movement (Ten Speed Press,
1993), p. 310n. Starobin's article notes that it was intended
for the "final" edition of the Report. Heirich confuses
the Report with its overview, in saying thousands of copies were
distributed. Goines repeats Starobin's reference, adding only
the names of Hollander, Schultz, and Irwin as responsibles.
(21) Typed letter from Robert S. Johnson
to President Kerr, November 24, 1964.
(22) To say, "if not then, then
next; if not here, then there" would be safer, and sufficient
for my argument. Yet I do think the where and when
were more clearly ordained. By late 1964, regional student
activism had a tremendous and growing head of steam, centered
from Berkeley, shaking the community; and pressure was mounting
from both sides for the administration to clarify the university's
ambiguous role in both harboring and restraining student activism.
(23) It seems likely that I was not
the only one to imagine our history's value as a tool of organizing
and negotiation. That no word surfaced of any others beginning
independently hardly proves that none did; and such argument
is misleading in view of how my own activity affected the field
situation. During the cop-car seige, and perhaps even in the
movement's first spontaneous meeting, I had identified myself
publicly and uniquely as being vividly concerned with our history's
pertinence. During the next week, I made myself visible in the
main relevant public venue (the forming GCC) as the one concerned
with such a project, and likely exited leaving an impression
that I was off to engage it by myself, probably furthered in
the rumor-mill during the following week by my brief emergences
from the seclusion of writing. After October 16, it was widely
known that a group had undertaken the project. At any stage in
this chain, on hearing of my effort, anyone who'd begun more
tentatively might well have had reason to think the matter in
better hands, and their own beginning not worth mentioning. One
need not resort to an esoteric vibrational signal of my anointment
to explain why no competitors emerged, and why the potential
post would have called other candidates more actively if I had
not appeared to fill it.
(24) This last theme is explored in "Barefoot
in a Marshmallow World" and "Looking Back at the FSM,"
op. cit.; and in "A Tale of Ten Years, a Father and
a Son," Rolling Stone #160, May 9, 1974, reprinted
as "A Father for our Time" in NAB.
(25) In "Barefoot in a Marshmallow
World," op. cit.
(26) It seems at least a remarkable
coincidence, if not profound, that the inward turn of the Civil
Rights movement to focus on Black identity, soon echoed in all
other hues of activism, became apparent only after the FSM.
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November 14,
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