At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

35 Sparring

Berkeley prior to 1963. They were far angrier than we were. They saw us as failures. We hadn’t pressed hard enough. We hadn’t risked enough. We had asked for change, not demanded it. In their eyes, they were the ¤rst generation of real radicals; we were just tired old liberals. They had given up on the political system, cynically believing that it only served the interests of dominant economic powers. When the administration explained that restrictions on speakers and political activity were necessary to protect the university’s budget and maintain its public image as a disinterested entity, it only reinforced the radicals’ negative perception of politics as usual. However, they had not given up on the legal system. Growing up in the 1950s, they had seen the federal courts order the end of racial segregation. Only the spring before, they had felt the erratic sympathy of judges and juries in the San Francisco criminal courts. A constant theme of the FSM was that only the courts should judge the legality of speech and its consequences and only the courts should punish anyone for words spoken on campus as well as off. The U.S. Constitution , especially the First Amendment, should be the only guide. 35 Sparring Although he stayed in touch with the campus, Kerr left ful¤llment of the October 2nd agreement to Chancellor Strong and returned to running the university system. He assumed that the chief campus of¤cer and his staff would follow the spirit as well as the letter of that agreement. However, once again the military model failed. Chancellor Strong had not participated in drafting the agreement, he had only a limited exposure to the discussions about its words and their meaning, he did not like it, and he did not approve of any process which displaced authority from 174 l At Berkeley in the Sixties the people in which it was of¤cially vested. Like Mario and most of the protest leaders, he was a man of high principle. But the principles he was committed to were different ones. Despite his liberal past, he was, as many observed later, a “law and order” man. First and foremost he believed that rules should be followed and duly constituted authority should be obeyed.1 He followed those principles in undermining the October 2nd pact. Strong heard with dismay Mario’s announcement of a noon rally for Monday, October 5th. Mario was no longer a student in good standing; what right did he have to schedule or speak at a rally on campus without appropriate sponsorship and administration approval seventy-two hours in advance? He decided to have Mario arrested, even though his faculty advisors counseled against it. Fortunately for Strong, Dean Towle decided to grant “a special waiver” for that rally only.2 For the next two months, special waivers miraculously appeared whenever they were needed. Indeed, many rules that Strong wanted to enforce were unof¤cially ignored. When we put a tub out on campus asking students to toss in money to repair the damaged cop car ($334.30)—a prohibited solicitation of funds—no one batted an eyelash. We held regular rallies from the steps of Sproul Hall—the new Hyde Park area—with prohibited ampli-¤ers powered by car batteries, and we passed around coffee cans to collect prohibited money to support our protests against the rules limiting what we could say and do. We could now pass out lea®ets on the campus proper, which we could not do before, and did so almost every day. But we couldn’t sell our new white-on-blue button, which said “Free Speech F.S.M.”—at least not openly on campus. We obeyed the new rules on tabling, but their sheer lunacy only reinforced our belief that they were arbitrary and capricious. Student groups traipsed to the City of Berkeley police department to apply for one of the three weekly permits to use the ten feet of public sidewalk bordering the twenty-six feet that we had used before. The Berkeley police issued them on a ¤rst come, ¤rst served basis. This put us into competition with each other during an election year in which demand was high. It was impossible to get a permit for a sudden emergency need, even when the permit-holders for that week weren’t making full use of them. The FSM used proxies to get all three permits every week that it could, which...