How the Free Speech Movement Began (1969)
A multiple memoir of the New Left
by MICHAEL ROSSMAN
That man in Chicago or wherever, the one they were doing the operation on and his heart stopped unexpectedly, and they iced his head and all while they finally got it started again, but by every test known to medical science he was dead for five full minutes. And it changed him; and after, he wrote a book about what it was like beyond, and about coming back. But didn’t he touch the ground differently, though! and feel the way his shirt rubbed his neck, and use his eyes with a different style, after he’d been genuinely certifiably dead, even if his heart was frail and might go at any moment.
We’re somewhat like that, our motion has the grace of coming after Impossible. I mean the set of changes in my generation, and in the younger kids, which is all we know of social health and social hope, and of community. The changes started showing up first in our public behavior, color them The New Activism, and then in our fairly private behavior, color them Hippyism. I happen to think a strong case can be made for the deep interrelation of these movements, two faces of a coherent cultural transition; and that we already can begin a useful description of the sources of this transition, in terms of the sharply-new social and cultural technologies that define our time.
But there’s a different way in which I think about where our change came from-which I do a lot, trying to figure out where it’s going and what it’s heading into, these days whose surfaces glitter with paranoid flashes of fear. Aside from the whole Black thing, and aside from tbe distant mythic Cain/Abel brother-rending thinglooming beyond and deeper tban the real generational clash which the present trivial hippy-pogrom portendsthere’s the War, the War. It presses upon our lives. My kid brother, scholarship freshman, is on the Dean’s reprimand list for the Dow sit-in; where will he be when tbey try to close the Boston Induction Center? My sister, her sad and daredevil lover l-AO near Pleiku, is gone with a nest of others to begin a grave and impossible building. peace project in a hostile town. Jan comes onto me about jail in the supermarket, I balance near the napkins, paralyzed by her voice’s shadows. But you were only in for nine weeks, she says, almost accusingly, look how long it took you to come back. What about five years? I tried to close my self off with statistics, wbatcould I say? Two thousand burnt draftcards now. So many like her Marty, who won’t flee to Canada and won’t go in: he waits in the graduate lottery. They live it over and over again in advance, to make it hurt less when it comes. I’m going to learn typing, she says, so I can get a job in Kentucky or wherever they send him. Last week, friends who helped organize the October anti-draft protests were indicted for criminal conspiracy, 1-to-3. Karen looks up, the fear she would mask betrayed for an instant when I tell her, be back later, going to a meeting. What kind? Planning. An incomplete gesture of her right hand: I wish you w . . . , unwillingly, signing the Complicity Statement with her left hand. (Karen is left~handed.) No, brothers and sisters and comrades, the horizon is heavy with darkness; 1 think and hope it is not hope tbat drives and sustains us in our difference.
Our hopeless beauty . . . Please understand what 1 mean by that beauty. 1 mean that kids are prettier now than they used to be and looser, more at ease with being themselves; and they touch each other more, even given all tbe bull that goes on about toucbing. And tbe beauty lies also in the faltering movements and moods we have created, filled with contradictions and life.
Our hopeless beauty, then, flowered from a barren landscape of Impossible. Granted: our motion once begun, tbe Monday-morning political historian can sort through the newsclips and our letters, and trick out a real pattern of contagion and causality: we grew in a describable way: in that sense and in retrospect, it wasn’t impossible. But 1 no longer believe tbings work in tbat neat and sensible fashion: 1 don’t think a description of seeds and forces sufficiently accounts for our change and its character, for the manner of its birth. For there is a sense of Impossible intimately connected with this birth, which will never be displayed in the social equations we build with our data.
Summer, 1964, some months before the Free Speech Movement illuminated our lives. During six years in Berkeley, I had watched new left politics begin with us, crest with the 1960 HUAC and Chessman demonstrations, and fill out its first phase that Spring, with successful waves of mass sit-ins at botelsand auto sbowrooms in San Francisco. Something real was in motion, with a puzzling newness which touched and promised my life. That was what struck me, that summer: the newness I sensed, and how so much of what we had we’d made ourselves, because there was no other way to get it. And I tried to remember where it’d been at when we started moving, what the landscape of possibility had seemed:
When the long season of fear settled in,
they felt the icebergs of loneliness grow:
friends froze and fell away,
informed, ate shit.
The rocks of insult hardening children
the arrows of letters bearing divorces, betrayals,
flights from and to the emptinesses of lost jobs,
feared chances the tangible moments of voiceless despair
at the imagined awaited knock at the door,
brought by strayed sound in the early darkness
all chipped away at the heart,
crumbled the granite of hope and belief,
and not content then ground them in the ground:
doors were fear, they wrote lies and spoke words carefully whitewashed,
friends were strangers, confidence closed,
and they waited for word of the trials eight years,
till the heart was gone, leaving a bleak moraine
scored by the irresistible gravel of pain and disbelief,
amputation and closure:hard, compacted, smooth,
nothing left to be torn away.
And the heart was gone, that’s all,
ot handed on: gone good and simple and forever.
They’ll never measure how those draining years
bled the color from a landscape, left us empty outline.
That was how it was when we began, I thought four years ago and think still. No one really believed anyone could do anything much about anything. In America those years, before the black people spoke up, with protest crushed and an empty glossy monolithic politics, a man who wanted change-and believed we would die without it-could throw his empty coffeecup on the ground and make it break; but not much else. It was against this background that we began to move: not out of hope, but because we had to, because that context of Impossible granted us a weird sort of freedom.
It’s hard to get a handle on that freedom, for we’re still just beginning to explore its implications. May I call it the Freedom of the Children of the Bomb? For that is the larger, or louder, background. Remember ten years ago, when to be Thoughtful about Television was the fashion: All that watching, what is it doing to the children? The question was never answered and people stopped wondering-until McLuhan suggested that those 15,000-hours-per-18-year-old might all along have been pressing heads in a rather odd fashion which is only now showing up. (Pardon me ma if I act funny.) Likewise, everyone used to make a big thing about how we were the first kids to grow up with the Bomb. As we were: though there may be many of my generation who can’t remember waking up with those nightmares, there’s enough who can so that they’re probably our most common property. But nobody ever said what all that meant.
What did it do to us, to learn as children to imagine the death of the world with a sound-shaped BOMB? At some deep and irrevocable level, I submit, we imaginehence believe, hence accept-absolute annihilation, from the Latin nihil, nothing. It’s all over, baby blue: pfffft, gone, done, that’s it. It has already happened. Just as your lover’s death and your own stalk, believed and living, in the jungles of the unexplored source of the Nile of your motions-which is part of what it is, to be a man-so the death of the race lives newly within us. With the reality of the possible, it has already happened. That shapes us, that spreads an indelible stain through our doing, that grants us the freedom to be what we are, for we are all there is. (Pardon me ma if I act free.) With that deep knowledge-which would be a presence even without the Cuban crisis, On The Beach, the Greenland H-bombs as constant reminder-kids are learning to touch what is, each other, and themselves. For this is the constant broad direction of the vehicles we choose for our motion: the kinds of educational reform we push, how we use pot and acid, the group-games we investigate, the way we try to style our political/social action, and so on: towards Touch. There are other descriptions; I put it this way because of that man from Chicago or wherever, and how he must have touched the ground differently after (while his heart stood watching like an unpredictable bomb; but I don’t think that part really matters) .
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why Whoopee!
we’re all gonna die!
(singer Country Joe and the Fish, in Vietnam Rag)
What strikes me is the genuineness of that raucous cry’s humor and cheer, so distinctively ours. Call it Absurd Affirmation if you must, though that name doesn’t ring true to me. All I know is that it comes from accepting Impossible and going on from there, free; and it has nothing to do with hope. I can’t explain this. I can only tell you about the event that led me to see it this way-the way I now see our response to the McCarthy Winter and the Bomb, as I sit watching our time advance with headline wings on a dark horizon, and think about going down to the Induction Center in April.
It was Oct. 2, 1964, and we were sitting around a car waiting. We’d been sitting there for 30 hours, a thousand
kids, trapping a police car in Sproul Plaza. The car was there to haul away a kid arrested for sitting at an illegal CORE table, collecting money and members. The table was illegal because the Administration had up and changed the rules governing campus political activity on us-by some coincidence, just when Civil Rights work seemed to be having a real impact, with the successful hotel and Auto Row sit-ins. And so, for the first time.. because it was something a lot of people had learned to care about, we fought back actively, to defend what had grown to be our own as we’d grown. And what happened after that, we called the Free Speech Movement.
Much was memorable about the FSM, which remains not only the longest and most energetic campus movement of our decade of rising protest, but also the one in which the characteristic traits of our political style (and its existential roots) appear most clearly. But that’s a long story, I’m writing a book. More to the point are the images that remain with me from that vigil around the car. A night of huddled community, showered by eggs and cigarettes from a minor mob of drunken fraternity kids. Minstrels in the morning, playing while shared sleepingbags were rolled and the Plaza swept clean. Strong Fall sun, sandwiches and lemonade and salt-tablets circulating among a weary sweating crowd, as if we had just invented cooperation, or on a warm and desperate picnic seen into each other’s eyes. The sockfooted solemn file at the microphone atop the car, in the first real public dialogue I had ever heard, speaking of ideas as though they had real substance and meaning, as though they might somehow be made relevant to the lives clustered there.
The news of 600 police, late in the second afternoon, massed on the other side of Sproul Hall, about to repossess their car; and no word at all from our negotiators, let alone from the faculty. (It is only now, with the first murders on campuses and troops guarding the Pentagon, that the number 600 and the danger seem ordinary.) Take off your pierced earrings, remove your ties, advised the microphone, if we link arms it is likely they will club us apart. Someone standing by the car in those closing minutes, with a big box of green pippin apples, tossing them out to faces without appetite but lit by sudden beams, as we sang We are not afraid in voices shaking with fear, and waited, free.
That event, remarks Mario, in response to my notion that the whole of the FSM was rooted and pre-performed in those galvanizing and transforming hours, has always seemed to me to have the archaic, primitive quality of a childhood dream. And it was such a thing of our beginnings, that I despair of ever being able to describe it usefully. For that, one would have to invent a form having somewhat of the slow, violent multiplex beauty of Ulysses in Nighttown.
But what I remember most clearly is this. I was standing by the car itself during the last hour: watching the faces and motions of those with whom I shared this complex action that was somehow of value; thinking in lastminute flash detail of the incident history of our seven years of politics: of how it had left us, changed, and given us nothing but our selves. Around our waiting touching disc of seated bodies, 3,000 ringed, a sizable number crying for our blood. Literally: chanting, We want blood, blood, blood. And it was clear that if the cops came in, as we expected, someone would be badly hurt, likely someone killed. A lot of people, even not-so-liberal faculty, have said so since, and I believed it at the time. I mean, we had this car, which was the only tangible thing we’d ever gotten (save for the sit-in successes; but this was their incarnation), and we just weren’t about to move.
A corny background chorus is singing We shall not be moved, and images of irresistible forces gather in the dark air, in the failing light. I stood by the car, thinking of how by the car was the most dangerous place to be and of going back out towards the edge where I’d been, and I stood by the car, running it all over in my head with a lucidity that clarified only complexity, and I stood by the car, munching on the live green of a pippin apple, and I stood by the car. There was nothing brave about this, nor grim, nor even in any sense dramatic, despite the spectacular setting: I was simply there, and accepted being there. Above all, my presence was not out of hope, nor accompanied by her. For I remember with perfect clarity thinking then: no matter what happens, whether or not the cops charge us, whatever we do or build or become: those jars for money and lists for names will never be back on the tables. And, hope given up, I was free to be there as I was, and I was.
We won that round: we got the tables back, for the time being, and in the process sparked a community whose life has persisted and grown. Now, 40 months later, we again are advocating actions that turn out to be illegal; the tables are recruiting people for another try at closing down the Induction Centers. That we will be left free to speak on seems unlikely; to close the Centers is clearly impossible. But then, we do not act from hope. I keep coming back to this, these days when the heart stops for a moment, trying to scan ahead into the chill mad currents of history. These threatening days, when our newness still stands on colt-unsteady legs, like an unauthorized fragile card-table on the edge of our campus generations: bearing a message only our own kind can or care to read, in glad amateur posters of care and despair: there is much to love and no reason to hope, be free.
Source: Commonweal 4/12/69
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