Lessons Learned from the Free Speech Movement

“I failed to realize that the vast majority of people, even in a progressive environment, such as what Berkeley claimed itself to be – I sometimes wonder – there was a tremendous fear of disruption without constructive program. And that took me years, really, after the movement to learn. That you have to not only incorporate but lead with constructive program. Meaning, what are you going to build and not just what you are going to tear down?”

Transcript

Good morning, everyone, or whatever time of day it is for you. This is our next episode of the Nonviolent Moment, where, to quote Marshall Frady, “An opponent's violence is met with a forgiving love.” I don't know how much love is going to actually be mobilized in this show today, but I look forward to discussing it with you in a moment.

[Music – Birmingham Sunday by Joan Baez]

Well, greetings again, everyone. And that was a singer whom, I was going to say needs no introduction. We called her Joanie – Joan Baez. But I later found out that some very young people didn't actually know who she was.

So, that was Joan Baez who was performing “Birmingham Sunday”. She was a classic example of the use of art for progressive purposes. Beautiful singer, beautiful person. She was very helpful to me when I was starting the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Berkeley, and on other occasions as well. So, hats off to you, Joanie. I hope everything is well with you.

Well, I want to talk today about a film that  actually arose from that moment when Joanie was doing those performances. It's a four-part documentary series called, “Inside the FSM”. FSM, of course, in case you were young enough to not be aware of that, FSM stands for the Free Speech Movement.

It was a four-part documentary by Linda Rosen. And, before I launch into it, which will just carry me right away here, I want to mention that Pace e Bene is having a Training for Trainers certification. That’s Pace e Bene. Italian for ‘peace and all good’. The greeting that was and still is popular among Franciscans since the 12th and 13th century.

But what I want to talk about in addition to strongly recommending the film to you because this was a pivotal moment in the history of our country and had repercussions around the world. I just recently heard that Prague Spring, the resistance to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Czech people which took place in 1968-69 and kind of showed that the Warsaw Pact, was not inflexible, not, undefeatable. That that was influenced by the Free Speech Movement uprising.

So, I want to talk about some of the lessons that I, for one, learned in that movement because I was involved up to the eyeballs. I was really passionately involved. The only reason I was not arrested, the reason I didn't go into Sproul Hall to be arrested with my comrades, was that we had just had a child. A young – my Jessica, and I couldn't see, leaving my wife alone with her. I think I would have had more trouble from that than it would have been worth.

But be that as it may, I was there. I played a couple of minor roles. One of them actually was sort of pivotal. One of the groups that was coordinating activities for this student strike was the GSA, the Graduate Student Alliance. And I was a graduate student at the time. I think, actually, I was the only person who was a student in the FSM and then immediately rolled over to be on the faculty in Berkeley. But I suppose if that is true and was a major claim to fame.

But my pivotal role was as follows, was kind of a moderating role. The faculty senate was about to meet, and because they were a third party and were extremely influential, they were positioned in between the students and the administrators. And our complaint was with the administration. And I'll get to that, why we were complaining and what we're complaining about, in a moment. But our complaint was not with the faculty. We really didn't know quite where they would weigh in.

So, we had a big meeting of the GSA the day before the faculty senate meeting. And most of my fellow students were saying, “Let's protest it. Let's block Wheeler Hall so they can't get in. Let's, heckle them,” so on and so forth. And I got up, and I said two things. I don't remember the other one, it was very unpopular. But my first thing that I said was, “You know, look, let's give an appearance of reasonableness.” And I'll get back to that in a second. “We actually don't know how the faculty is going to vote, so why should we be against them and protest them and so forth, when we don't know where they stand yet. Let's give them a chance to express themselves.”

That sounded reasonable to my colleagues. And we lined up to face the professors as they walked into Wheeler Hall, but we were not blocking it or protesting them or being hostile in any way. And of course, the rest is history. We know that they voted 834 to 141 in our favor. And that was the successful conclusion of the Free Speech Movement as far as our campus was concerned.

So that was my role, my important role. Another not so important role was driving around and picking up students who had been released from Santa Rita prison, those who had been arrested and hauled off there, brought back to campus in the middle of the night and just dumped there.

We were very well coordinated. We actually had walkie-talkies. So, you could be at Sather Gate talking to somebody on North Side. And that was one of the lessons that I learned. Something about spontaneous organization is entirely possible. And so, my secondary role, as I say, was to pick up students who had been put off the bus at Sather Gate, the entrance to campus, and drive them wherever they needed to go.

So, on the positive side, it was an awfully engaging, real, warm experience. The camaraderie was just wonderful. There was, of course, there were disagreements, how to proceed, but there was no ill will among us as students. There were some ill will that was not well directed. I want to get to that in a moment.

But it showed something to everyone, actually, about the power of the people. In fact, I would say, in particular, the power of young people because that’s what we mostly were. And it showed that you can have intense camaraderie in a good cause. 

It's often said that there's nothing quite like the camaraderie of soldiers and other military because they're facing death. But this is quite revealing for me because we were not facing death because of our idealism. We were facing, at most, the loss of a semester, a little bit of time in Santa Rita prison, but really, you know, not a big deal. So, in other words, camaraderie can be based on the positive rather than negative mutual experiences. And that, I think, is very important.

And probably the most important thing of all that we learned – and here I have to give you a little bit of background. You may not be aware that the 60s were a rebellion against the 50s, and two aspects of the 50s that are closely coordinated. One was the absolutely vacuous, bland, commercial, superficial culture that was blanketing the country at that time. And it was a superficiality that suppressed change because it suppressed any kind of conversation. And that's what really the Free Speech Movement was about.

And in particular, it was about racism, which is one of the evils that can very easily be papered over by the kind of, bland superficiality that we were experiencing. You have to remember that Sinclair Lewis' novel “Babbitt” was written during and because of the superficiality of this period. Where the biggest decision that a person would make in his life, for example, as I remember one scene from that book, was whether to have a martini cocktail or some other kind of, quote, “weird drink” because of what other people were doing?

So, this conformism can – of course it doesn't have to be, but it can be, a very enabling force for evil, for the wrong. And the wrong, in this case, that precipitated the movement was a measure. This is very interesting since Sonoma County will be voting on an important measure right now. This measure was called Proposition 14. And Proposition 14 simply didn't look too dangerous on the surface.

It simply said that landlords have a right to refuse rental of their property to whomever they wish, and they didn't have to show just cause. Now, that seems like something that had to do with the rights of landlords. But we knew what it really meant. It meant that segregated neighborhoods in Berkeley would remain segregated. And don't forget the Civil Rights Movement was going on in the South, and that was the issue of the day, as it is of our own – racism.

And so, we knew that this thing was a racist measure. And we had organized a campaign called “No On 14.” I can still see the bumper stickers and the placards today. And we've set up our card tables and our booths in Sproul Plaza and Dwinelle Plaza, to get people educated about Prop 14.

And the university decided something which made sense in a vacuum, and made sense given their values. Their values were, hey, this place is about teaching, and learning is not about political organizing, and there’s a danger of polarization. Which, as we know, is very, very real and that would interfere with the intellectual mandate and purpose of the university.

However, they were omitting to mention one thing. If we couldn't organize on campus against this thing which we, you know, hated on a gut-level, where else could we go? There was nowhere else in Berkeley where 20 to 25,000 people would walk past your card table every day. And there were no halls where we could do the organizing, and so forth.

So, yeah, as I say, this rule made a certain amount of sense in a vacuum, but it was killing our movement, which we regarded as absolutely critical. But really, as I say, there was this deeper issue that the whole culture really was at stake. And, you may even have heard some of the famous comments made by our hero, Mario Savio, in his speeches, where he said, “There is a time –.” And this is a direct quote, I won’t attempt to imitate his voice, but I can hear it. “There was a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious that you cannot allow it to continue. You have to throw yourself on the gears and the switches.”

Now, the machine – we now have a word for what he was objecting to, which I don't think we had really been able to formulate quite so clearly in that day. That word is “dehumanization.” Treating people as cogs in a machine. Treating students as consumers who consume an education so that they could go and get a higher paying job. Which was, in another dimension of it, was going to propagate and enforce elitism that, you know, there was a cultural as well as a political dimension to this.

So, that was a very, very deep-seated aversion that we were having. And of course, the People's Park became part of that. And also, of course, the beatniks had been part of it, and the hippie movement. Whatever you may think about it, it did create a kind of leaven in a society which was becoming absolutely stultifying and insufferable, especially to young people who wanted to see wider horizons. So, those were some of the positive things about that movement, the fragrance of which is still with me, below these many years after, as you can tell.

But some of the negative things – I think these were important lessons that to some degree we are learning and we need to be learning going forward. One of them was that an incomplete revolution is worse than no revolution at all. Now, the issues that we were fighting about was extremely important. Free speech and the ability to be politically significant, I don't want to underestimate that. But just to achieve free speech on our campus and other campuses across the country and across the world, you know, Wisconsin, Harvard, rapidly followed suit.

That really there were deeper issues involved here. It reminded me a little bit – this is a much grimmer episode in history. It was the Sendero Luminoso in Peru, which was a group of guerillas – they called themselves the Sendero Luminoso guerillas – who showed, in an oppressive regime, that Peru was and sometimes still is, that they could assassinate policemen and get away with it. But that's all they showed. And eventually the Peruvian people turned against them and wouldn't support them because they weren't in favor of chaos and destruction.

And that was one of the things that we didn't completely understand. We underestimated, and if we were aware of it at all, we probably made fun of it, people's fear of chaos. You know, I come from a kind of Bohemian background in New York and the weirder and the more different things were, the more comfortable I was with them.

But I failed to realize that the vast majority of people, even in a progressive environment, such as what Berkeley claimed itself to be – I sometimes wonder – there was a tremendous fear of disruption without constructive program. And that took me years, really, after the movement to learn. That you have to really not only incorporate but lead with constructive program. Meaning, what are you going to build and not just what you are going to tear down?

So, we had some elements of constructive program. We wanted the educational institution to be changed in some ways, that would make it more democratic, but some of our demands were completely unrealistic, but they were in the right direction.

But really, we needed a lot more constructive program. We needed a lot more awareness of the needs of the people we were opposing. That is a very powerful element of nonviolence. When you can say, “Yes, I understand you need this, and I can give you this much of it, but you have to realize that this part here is hurting us.”

And on the emotional level, a very important negative lesson that I learned was that mere gut level raw rebellion is not creative. I mean, for example, there were people who expressed a great deal of personal hostility against individual administrators. Now, some of them were pretty obnoxious people, if I say so myself. But they were obnoxious partly because that's, you know, that's where they stood.

But partly because of the position in which they found themselves. That they were, you know, given a job to do to maintain law and order so that, the campus could carry out its mission to educate people.

But there was so much ad hominem hostility expressed in the movement that it turned me off. And I began to realize – just my own personal growth and how that factors in here – I began to realize that I really wasn't a political animal. Now, I look back on it, I see my life unfolding in three acts, if you will.

The first act was artistic. And that's where I was deeply involved in folk music and so forth. I was very Bohemian, and that was the artistic phase. The second phase, catalyzed by the movement down south, the Civil Rights Movement, was political.

So, I went from just being, you know, cultural to being political. And later on, I ended up where I am now, which I guess I will call spiritual. So, it was an interesting personal development or trajectory of mine. But as I want to say, a lot can be learned both from our mistakes, and from our advantages, and what we did accomplished. And I want to strongly recommend, “Inside the FSM,” by Linda P. Rosen.

Thank you so much for listening. I am Michael Nagler, this has been the Nonviolent Moment.