The SIXTIES and SEVENTIES from BERKELEY to WOODSTOCK

The Sixties and Seventies from Berkeley to Woodstock

Sather Gate, U.C. Berkeley.
Click to enlarge and for details

Joan Baez sitting-in at Sproul Hall,
supporting the right of students
to solicit on campus, especially
for civil rights issues. (Photo by
Richard Muller. Used with permission.)

Berkeley California to the End of 1966

In early 1964, students from the University of California were joining others on campus in supporting equality and jobs for blacks, including demonstrations at Lucky's supermarket in Berkeley, auto-row and the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco, and at Oakland's major newspaper, the Tribune. Among the students at Berkeley were those who went to the Republican convention in San Francisco to demonstrate their support for Governor Scranton, Goldwater's rival for the Republic Party's nominee for President. Some conservatives in the Bay Area were disturbed by organizing on-campus for agitation off-campus. The leader of Californians for Goldwater and a political power in the area was Senator William Knowland, owner of Oakland's Tribune. It is rumored that Knowland complained to the university administration. Knowland was to deny this. At any rate, the university administration was concerned about the appearance of scruffy looking radicals at the main entrance to the university soliciting donations, passing out leaflets and creating a bad impression for visitors entering university grounds, and the university was determined to do something about it.

Among the student-activists attending the University of California at Berkeley were thirty to sixty who had gone to the South in 1964 for "Freedom Summer." And when they returned to campus in September they joined others in supporting local civil rights organizing. Political activity was forbidden on campus. Students, sitting behind card tables, were soliciting on the sidewalk at the entrance to the campus -- on what was believed to be city property. The university administration discovered that this area was actually university property, and it included the area in its ban on soliciting. Students were upset, and believing that they had the right of free speech, they moved their tables onto campus. Having defied segregation in the South and having organizing skills that they had learned in the civil rights movement, they ably organized defiance against university policy. And against the students, the university administration vacillated as it tried to keep disruption and bad publicity at a minimum.

Then on October 1, the university attempted a showdown with the students by sending a campus police squad car to arrest a politically active student who had been sitting at a table for the Congress of Racial Equality. Students sat in around the police car through the night and into the following day. Some fraternity boys expressed their hostility verbally and by tossing lighted cigarettes and garbage onto people sitting-in, and those sitting-in responded with civil rights songs. Students who had stood on the roof of the police car to make speeches had left it dented, and the activist students took up a collection to pay for the damage.

On the second day, police were massed just off campus, waiting for orders to move against the sit-in. But rather than a messy confrontation that was sure to make the news, the President of the California's university system, Clark Kerr, encouraged by the university's faculty, offered the demonstrators a compromise. The student still under arrest in the police car was to be booked and then released without the university pressing charges, and negotiations were to follow for establishing permanent rules. Spokespersons for the demonstrators accepted, and the sit-in ended.

But agreements on campus rules were not worked out between the administration and what was now a student organization called the Free Speech Movement. Kerr was upset that among the top half-dozen or so leaders of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) was Bettina Aptheker, daughter of a Communist Party scholar; Michael Rossman, a self-described "red-diaper baby," and a couple of people who could be described as Trotskyists. Kerr was concerned about appearing to be caving into Communists. Kerr complained about the FSM leadership, and the FSM rank and file was surprised that Kerr would, in their words, "resort to red-baiting." Kerr was under pressure from the university's board of regents, and he moved to suspend a few of the student leaders. The Free Speech Movement called for an overnight sit-in at the campus administration building (Sproul Hall). Their strategy was to force Kerr into bringing police onto campus, believing that this would help broaden their base of support. It would, they calculated, take fifteen hours for the police to arrest and take away all those sitting in.

The sit-in began on December 2, with the movement's star speechmaker, Mario Savio, making a fiery speech. Savio was an impassioned former civil rights worker in Mississippi, from a working class family and an exceptional student. He spoke of "the machine" becoming so odious and making one so sick at heart that one had to put one's body on the gears and wheels. Then Joan Baez sang, and about a thousand people marched into the administration building.

Kerr and his associates were in contact with the state's governor, Pat Brown. A false report went to Brown that the students were "busting up" offices. Pat Brown called in the Highway Patrol -- California's elite police force. Through the night and much of the next day 733 arrests were made, and the police cleared the building by dragging the arrested students down the stairs -- bump, bump, bump. The movement's strategy of non-violence -- learned from the civil rights movement -- worked. They broadened their support. Many faculty members were upset by the police having come onto campus and used force, and they threw their support to the student's fight for the freedom to organize politically on campus. It was the first big student rising in the United States in modern times, and it was a sensation in the United States and abroad, and it set an example for other campuses.

Support for the students was, however, narrow. Television crews had been coming to campus, and most of their coverage was moronic in that it was snapshots of the most sensational happenings without background information, and most of what description was added to the snapshots was unflattering toward the activists. Only journalists from the New York Times and one or two other elite news organizations tried to gather perspective by in-depth interviews.

The Hearst newspapers focused on the Marxist influence on campus, and people across California were complaining that they had not been able to go to college because they had to work and here were these ungrateful kids at Berkeley rioting. Hate mail had arisen, describing the students as rotten beatniks, as malodorous, over-privileged, under-brained, bleeding-heart megalomaniacs and as serving the Communist plan to takeover the country.

A New Activism in Berkeley and Re-election for Lyndon Johnson

Television and newspaper coverage of events on campus, was helping to radicalize students on campus -- some of them from Republican families. So too was the fact that it had been a liberal governor, "Pat" Brown, who had ordered the police onto campus. Some students began looking for alternative sources for an understanding of events and to those to the left of liberalism. Some of Berkeley's illustrious faculty members, discomforted by the attitudes and tactics of the Left on campus, and the politicization of the campus, began looking elsewhere for employment, among them the liberal-leftist sociologist opposed to the U.S. policy in Vietnam, Nathan Glazer.

The new year began with students returning to their routine schoolwork, while rules were being worked out for the orderly administration of university life. The Free Speech Movement had called for the administration to be responsible for no more than maintenance, such as sweeping up, letting the faculty and students run things. This did not happen, but the Free Speech Movement did win for students the right to maintain tables and to organize on campus, and to use a microphone for speeches at Sproul Hall during the noon hour.

As those arrested for sitting-in at Sproul Hall were attending court together and facing fines, probation or light jail sentences, student activism was shifted to opposition to President Johnson's policies regarding Vietnam. Johnson had easily defeated Goldwater in November 1964. Goldwater had done well among whites in Southern cities, but Johnson had won urban blacks in the South -- who had voted heavily for Richard Nixon in 1960. Johnson had won with 61 percent of the popular vote, the greatest margin of victory by any contender for the presidency. Goldwater had come across as a man interested in abstract principles and as most uncompromising regarding communism. Johnson had won portraying himself as the man interested in the well being of all Americans, as less likely than Goldwater to get the United States involved in a nuclear war. And Johnson had campaigned stating that American boys should not fight a war that Asian boys should be fighting.

Instead, Johnson began sending regular military units to Vietnam, to prevent the fall of the regime in Saigon, which was losing its war against the Communist forces. In the summer of 1965 demonstrations began on the train tracks that ran through Berkeley taking recruits to the Oakland Army Depot. In the fall of 1965 a teach-in was held on the Berkeley campus, with well known speakers such as Normal Mailer, Norman Thomas, Isaac Deutscher and Paul Goodman. The teach-in ended with people pouring off-campus and onto Telegraph Avenue for a planned march to the army base in Oakland, the demonstrators filling the avenue from curb to curb and still pouring off campus when the front of the march reached Ashby Avenue a mile away.

Meanwhile, with all of the publicity that Berkeley was receiving across the nation, it and San Francisco were becoming a Mecca for restless youths. Some of them had long hair and were called hippies. Some of them believed in sharing. Young people crowded together in apartments, living off the nation's affluence, with food that was discarded by supermarkets because it was not fresh. And some of the new arrivals were receiving checks from parents. Timothy Leary, a psychologist expelled from the faculty at Harvard University, was advocating that young people "tune in, turn on and drop out." People were beginning to try marijuana, speed, and the substance that Leary championed: LSD.

What had been a community of students and intellectuals became more of a place of strangers, with some young people walking down Telegraph Avenue -- the main street just off campus -- looking for peace and serenity and some others looking for action of some sort. Before 1966, around campus parties sometimes spilled out into front yards and one could step inside and be welcomed, nibble cheese, drink wine and dance. That had changed. Parties were now behind closed doors and consisted of smoking marijuana and staring into space.

To Berkeley had come people who were opposed to all authority, a few of them perhaps philosophical anarchists, the others just intuitively anarchistic -- kids who had probably had problems with their parents. They were Berkeley's equivalent to the anarchists that plagued the Russian Revolution. They were eager to chant "pigs" to the police. And during demonstrations against the war, these anarchist-types were happy to smash windows, amid pleas from other marchers not to do so. During a demonstration on campus one of their acts of revolution was to raid a Coca-Cola delivery truck while the driver looked on, despairing and feeling helpless. An off-campus activist set fire to the Berkeley campus' Wheeler Auditorium, angering faculty and students. Another off-campus activist invaded the Airforce recruitment office in downtown Berkeley and shot and killed a African-American Airforce recruiter.

In Berkeley, the crime rate was rising -- from 5,037 major offenses in 1963 to 12,252 in 1968. In San Francisco, the group into sharing called the Diggers, were being harassed by thrill-seekers and tourists, and they decided it was time to get out of town. They paraded with a casket symbolizing the death of their movement, and then they headed north into Mendocino Country, where not long before a young man with long hair who drifted into a bar might be beaten up.

Ronald Reagan Runs for Governor

Ronald Reagan had made an impressive appearance as a speaker and supporter of Barry Goldwater in Goldwater's bid for the presidency in 1964. Immediately after Goldwater lost the election a committee of Republicans formed to support Reagan for the next round of presidential elections. Reagan and his wife Nancy were not interested in that or in appeals to run for governor of California. They relished their comfort. But he agreed to speak across the state to help California's Republican Party.

In various communities, grass roots Republicans urged him to run in the 1966 gubernatorial election. He writes in his autobiography of the opinions he heard:

People were tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers; and they were angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind's problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers' dollars at them. [note]

Ronald Reagan, an American Life, p. 147.

Reagan decided to run, telling his wife Nancy that he did not think they could "run away from it." And he won the Republic primary, against the former mayor of San Francisco, Warren Christopher. Then it was Reagan against Governor "Pat" Brown, the man who had won against Richard Nixon's run for governor in 1962.

Reagan appeared before groups and took a lot of questions, knowing that his responses would appear less scripted than a speech. Contributing to his election were those who were disturbed as Reagan was by what was happening on the Berkeley campus. In his autobiography Reagan describes California's public universities - in the plural -- as "going up in smoke" with students "literally setting fire to them." [note]

Ronald Reagan, an American Life, p. 152.

Living in Berkeley at the time, and working on campus, I was close to the events in Berkeley, and to me Reagan's view appears inaccurate. Many of the students were radical and against the war but they saw no point in destroying campus property. It was not a student who set fire to Wheeler Auditorium. Reagan failed to differentiate between campus radicals and the off-campus anarchist types who joined in demonstrations and protests and did meaningless acts such as breaking glass with stones, setting bonfires and chanting "pigs."

Reagan was a supporter of United States military intervention in Vietnam, believing it was against Communist expansion. He was opposed to all forms of lawlessness. He was watching the crime rate rise during the rise of the counter-culture, which included a new respect among people for "ripping off the establishment." He was opposed to those he called hoodlums, lazy professors and vacillating university administrators. Specifically, he was upset with Clark Kerr for having compromised with the Free Speech Movement. During the campaign he spoke of his respect for U.C. Berkeley as a great institution but that he was "sick" at what had happened there, that he was sick of the "sit-ins, the teach-ins and the walkouts." He said that as governor he would organize a "throw out" and that Clark Kerr would head the list.

Reagan ran as a non-politician while claiming that he would become a special kind of politician: a "citizen" politician. He labeled his opponent, Governor Pat Brown, as a professional politician -- while Pat Brown, as honorable a citizen as anyone, believed that taking politics out of government was like taking flour out of bread.

Brown had been popular, and he appeared to be a happy man, without any of the pomposities in manner or speech that one often sees in politicians. At first he thought Reagan would be easy to defeat. Reagan had no experience in running any kind of government -- city or state. But soon Brown was running scared, as Reagan was painting his administration as soft on student riots and soft on lawlessness in general. Brown was actually a tough law and order man. But Reagan made himself look tougher than Brown, while Brown was supporting Fair Employment, Fair Housing, Equal Opportunity and Social Justice. Some taxpayers were also unhappy with the amount of money that state government was spending on support for the poor, and Reagan won their votes by criticizing state spending.

Reagan complains in his autobiography that Brown "stuck to his one-note campaign of attacks on me as 'that Hollywood actor in makeup.'" He writes that he was not wearing makeup and had not for years and that he took joy in appearing on "Meet the Press" and finding Brown and the reporters in make up.

Suggesting during the campaign the he was a racist Reagan found insulting. Reagan had always wanted equality for blacks. He told an audience in 1965 that he supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that it should be enforced "at the point of a bayonet if necessary."

Reagan won the election and stepped into the Governor's office in early 1967. Radicals were ready to begin demonizing him, although it was public opinion that had elected him on which they should have focused their concern.

Soon, while governor, all of the disturbances that Reagan had complained of during the campaign became more pronounced. 1967 was a year of more rioting by blacks in urban centers. In California it was the year of the anti-draft riot in downtown Oakland and the spread of upheaval from Berkeley to other college campuses. Governor Reagan could no longer blame the disturbances on California's Democrats, and he removed responsibility for the disturbances from the governor's office and focused blame elsewhere.

please continue

to navigation links at the top