Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (review)

There are two pieces of oratory that surpass in eloquence the many iconic speeches of 1960s America. The first is Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream.” The second is Free Speech Movement (fsm) leader Mario Savio’s “Bodies Upon the Gears.” Delivered in December 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley, the speech invited Savio’s fellow students to confront the impersonal, repressive machine that the university had become. He incited students to acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to challenge the limitations the university had imposed upon students’ freedom of speech.

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

(326)

Freedom’s Orator recounts Savio’s life. But this book is more than biography. Savio serves as a vehicle to examine the period he arose from and the impact that 1960s protest had on future generations. “It would be difficult to imagine,” writes Cohen, “a movement and a leader that better embodied the New Left ideal of participatory democracy than the fsm and Savio.” (7) Savio’s rhetoric, “much like the fsm itself,” says the author, “transcended ordinary politics. It embodied a mass movement rooted in moral principle.” (3)

Cohen is no newcomer to this subject. An historian at New York University, he is co-editor of The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (2002). Also of note is his study of an earlier student movement, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (1997). Cohen attempts to provide a biography of Savio, while at the same time presenting a detailed account of the fsm from its birth in the fall of 1964 to its dissolution in April 1965. While highly successful in the latter, there are gaps in the former.

Born 8 December 1942 in New York City to working class Italian immigrants, Savio faced many challenges. As a child he suffered a debilitating stammer. This was compounded by sexual abuse, which led to a lifelong battle with depression. Despite such hurdles he excelled in school, overcoming his speech disability, and graduating as valedictorian. His post-secondary education was unsettled. Berkeley, where he arrived in 1963, was the third college of his undergraduate career. There he joined the University Friends of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (ufsncc). Through ufsncc he enlisted in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project. Returning to Berkeley that fall, he continued his activism. When the university enacted regulations prohibiting students from engaging in political speech on campus, the issue united students in opposition. The fsm was born when 4,000 students rallied on 1–2 October after police arrested civil rights activist Jack Weinberg for staffing an information table. Students prevented the police car from moving and used its roof as a stage for speakers for the next 32 hours. When the university initiated expulsion proceedings against Savio and others for their role in the October actions the fsm rallied on 2 December. Savio gave his “Bodies Upon the Gear” speech. The brilliance of the speech, notes Cohen, was in its universal transferability. (182) The machine metaphor transcended campus, local, and national realities. The contest between students and the university finally ended when the Faculty Senate voted its support of the fsm. With that, Savio resigned from the fsm’s leadership and the organization voted itself out of existence. Savio eschewed further leadership roles. Following the death of his mother sometime in the 1970s...