“We have a saying in the movement that you can’t trust anybody over 30.” said Jack Weinberg.
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Barbara Toby Stack's FSM Pages
“We have a saying in the movement that you can’t trust anybody over 30.” said Jack Weinberg.
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 December 4, 1964: Jack Weinberg in discussion with Bill Mandel. Howard Harawitz photo, used with permission.
William Mandel, Saying No To Power, p. 394 Decades later Jack [Weinberg] told me that he had invented the slogan, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,”—which became one of the hallmarks of the ’60s nationwide—specifically against me. He had nothing against me personally, but wanted to counter the allegation that they were being manipulated by older people, particularly of Communist persuasion. |
Peter, UCB 1958, SLATE co-founder, and also legal advisor to Mario Savio. Oct. 17, 1964 Interview about the FSM. Peter Franck: SLATE, Law, and Politics on the Berkeley Campus
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Alice Hamburg, Madeline Duckles, and possibly Decca Treuhaft
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member FSM Executive Committee, author BERKELEY: The New Student Revolt
Barbara Toby Stack boldings Dear All: I don't know why, but let me reply. I recall no small committee with Draper and Mandel as members. The only important small committee leading the FSM I recall was the SC. If some such "shadow cabinet" existed, it certainly eluded me. Draper, as I recall it, had a more-or-less hands-off approach to FSM. He generously provided advice to me and to others when we sought it; and he he was willing to speak and to act at our request. However, I don't recall him attending FSM Ex Com or S Com meetings. (Maybe it happened once or twice, but it certainly was no pattern.) Even within the Independent Socialist Club (ISC), Draper did not usually play an active role in ISC's day-to-day FSM-related discussions. Here too, he was more of a senior advisor, available for advice and help. But he left this leadeship role to student members of ISC like Mike Parker, Joel Geir and others. Finally, on the question of how FSM tapped into the collective experiences of previous left movements from the 1930's, etc. My recollection was that the major contribution here came from certain graduate students who -- while they were not old enough to have personally experienced those earlier movements -- were well versed in those traditions, and helped to serve as a transmission link. The name that most comes to my mind was Bob Kaufman. But there were many. Draper helped me to understand the agreement that ended the police car event as something we should interpret as FSM having been granted formal recognition as a bargaining agent. This, to me, was a critically important lesson that shaped how I subsequently behaved. It was a lesson with roots in the experiences of union organizing campaigns of the 30's onward, experiences that at the time, I knew little about. In other matters as well, Draper helped with FSM's intellectual understanding. His speech and pamphlet: "The Mind of Clark Kerr," I believe, was a critical intellectual contribution in the formation of what I would consider to have been the "FSM mindset." I provide these examples to suggest that Draper's contribution was not organizational. I suspect he actually conisdered himself more as a supporter of FSM than as a "member." His contribution was intellectual and advisory. But, it was also, I believe, most critically important. jack [Weinberg] Workers' Liberty The free-speech fight that shaped the New Left * Hal Draper — a prominent third camp socialist — was a librarian at UC Berkeley at the time. The FSM amended their slogan “Trust no one over thirty” to include “…except Hal Draper” in recognition of his continuous advice, solidarity and support.
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Brad Cleaveland
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SLATE Supp Vol I No IV September 10, 1964 per California Monthly A LETTER TO UNDERGRADUATES from Brad Cleaveland "FROM THIS POINT ON, DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND ME. MY INTENTION IS TO CONVINCE YOU THAT YOU DO NOTHING LESS THAN BEGIN AN OPEN, FIERCE, AND THOROUGHGOING REBELLION ON THIS CAMPUS."
11/17/2011, Time.com, Occupy Oakland Protests Regroup at Berkeley, Jason Motlagh "The resurgence in Berkeley is a shot in the arm for Occupy movements across the country. The break up of Occupy Wall Street on Tuesday was accompanied by similar actions in Seattle and an ancillary camp in San Francisco, on the heels of other raids in Portland, Oregon, Salt Lake City, Denver and Oakland. Authorities cited concerns about sanitation, drugs and crime to justify police actions. But in Berkeley, heavy-handed police conduct (and an abundance of cameras) appear to have backfired, much as it did in Oakland on Oct. 25 when an Iraq War veteran was seriously injured by police. Last week, police used batons to disband a student rally against tuition hikes and budget cuts. Video of the incident went viral on the Internet, galvanizing sympathy for the campaign. (Read 'Occupy Oakland: After Second Police Raid, Protest Ends with a Whimper.') ¶ Indeed, the Tuesday rally stretched from the columns of Sproul Hall, a touchstone of the Free Speech Movement, to rooftops surrounding the plaza out front. Students stood shoulder to shoulder with nostalgic veterans of the 60s-era protests, and counterparts from Oakland, many of whom had marched about five miles from the cleared City Hall plaza to show their support. 'You can raid a camp, but not a movement,' says Luke, 22, a displaced Oakland camper, moments before a speech by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calling on students to take a moral stand against the hyper-wealthy. The rally culminated in a vote on whether to set up tents in defiance of a university order; it passed unanimously. ¶ 'This is overpowering for me; it's a movement I helped start,' says Bradford Cleaveland, 80, a long-time activist and former graduate student who offered encouragement to students. He shared a black-and-white picture of him on the steps of Sproul Hall next to Mario Savio, the late student leader famous for his 'put your bodies upon the gears' address, to establish his bona fides. 'It's the same, but better, because it's more difficult to do this kind of thing now -- there's so much fear.'" |
Barbara Toby Stack boldings Joan Baez was having second thoughts. The popular folksinger had promised to come to Berkeley to take part in our Free Speech Movement sit-in the following day, December 2, 1964. But, the evening before show time, her mentor Ira Sandperl rang. As a member of the FSM steering committee, I took the call. “Would we commit ourselves to remain strictly nonviolent?” asked Ira, a Gandhi scholar who had marched for civil rights with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “No,” I replied. “We can't.” My bluntness surprised us both, but Joanie was stepping on our toes. FSM was an irritatingly democratic and anti-authoritarian movement and we would make our own decisions. Nor did we need any pacifist noodging. Most of us were fighting for the right to use free speech on campus to organize nonviolent civil disobedience against racial discrimination and other ills, primarily in neighboring Oakland and San Francisco. As diplomatically as I could, I reminded Ira that we were a broad coalition of groups, from revolutionary socialists to Goldwater Republicans, and I could hardly speak for them all. But, I told him, at our last meeting, we had voted overwhelmingly to use non-violent tactics to occupy Berkeley’s administration building, Sproul Hall. A great soul with a superb sense of whimsy, Ira heard what he needed to hear. Joan came the following day, sang beautifully, and had her say. “Muster up as much love as you possibly can, and as little hatred and as little violence, and as little ‘angries’ as you can – although I know it's been exasperating,” she told us. “The more love you can feel, the more chance there is for it to be a success.” With those words, nearly 2,000 of us marched into Sproul Hall, and Time magazine named Baez “the Joan of Arc of the Free Speech Movement.”[i] By contrast, our own Mario Savio had already launched us onto a less loving path. “There is a time,” he declared, “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.”[ii] My own take differed from both. While a graduate student in Ann Arbor in the early 1960s, I had taken part in nonviolent demonstrations, but had given little serious thought to Gandhian ideas until one night at the home of Tom Hayden, one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). A group of us were sitting in his basement discussing the civil rights movement in the South, when an earnest young woman asked in all seriousness, “Would it be nonviolent if I pushed away an attacking police dog?” I did not know whether to laugh or cry, and I felt the same about Joan's nonviolent faith. As a secular Jew who had grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust, I could not see how getting rid of my “angries” would have stopped Hitler. Nor was it going to dissuade university administrators who had just initiated disciplinary measures against Mario and three others. As for Mario's truly eloquent cry of anguish, most of us in the graduate student leadership saw the Sproul Hall sit-in less as an expression of existential outrage and more as a trigger for further escalation. We expected the authorities to react by bringing outside police onto campus, as they did, and we had prepared to respond with a student strike that our graduate teaching assistants would lead. The strike, we hoped, would shut down the university, force the faculty to get off their backsides, and give us a famous victory for free speech, which is how it all turned out. From soul force to human obstruction to political jujitsu, these different approaches to nonviolence appealed to individual activists in varying degrees. But, as a group, we came to a post-Gandhian mix and match, never codified except in practice. We barely gave it a name, except perhaps for “tactical nonviolence,” which is what I called a free university course that I later gave at Stanford. By hit or miss, we combined FSM’s tactical brilliance with the strategic bent of the graduate students. We transformed Joan’s call for love into a pragmatic openness toward potential antagonists, whether Christian evangelists, football cheerleaders, or even the police. And, far more consequential than most observers have realized, we followed Mario’s lead in rejecting for all time the conservatizing Socratic call to uphold the state’s authority by willingly accepting punishment for any laws we might break. Goodbye bitter hemlock, catch us if you can.[iii] Our thinking continued to evolve as we used our hard-won freedom on campus to launch nonviolent demonstrations against the rapidly escalating war in Southeast Asia. Students on other campuses did the same, as university administrators across the country gave new freedom to speech, in part out of fear that our example would spread. Those were heady days. Our Berkeley contingent stopped troop trains and held marches that brought dramatic confrontations with the Oakland Police and chain-wielding Hells Angels whom the cops encouraged to attack us. All the way we remained irritatingly democratic and transparent, used peaceful negotiations and the intercession of poet Allen Ginsberg to dissuade the Hells Angels, tried our best to give individual participants control over how much risk they wanted to take, and used our nonviolent direct action only against those on the Dark Side, never on their behalf. |
Oral History, Transcribed by the Berkeley Oral History Project of the Berkeley Historical Society Barbara Toby Stack boldings ...Bob was the lawyer defending the Berkeley students during the free speech movement... Bob Treuhaft: I was here at home with my wife playing Scrabble around ten o'clock at night. The phone call came and it was [Mario] Savio saying that the Steering Committee wants to meet me. "They're sitting in there, and there's 700 of us ... we want you to come. They're letting people out but they're not letting anybody in; but they'll let you in." So I went right over. I told my wife I'll be back in an hour or so... And so, around towards midnight, we did get word through the walkie-talkie that the police were coming. Now in the building, when I learned that things were becoming tense, I was told that the students would be sitting-in on the two upper floors of the building. None would be on the main floor. They expected the police to come in on the main floor and I would be stationed down there to meet them... There were two other people on the main floor -- one of them was Ed Meese and another one was Lowell Jensen. Lowell Jensen is now a federal judge; Ed Meese and he were deputy district attorneys, deputies of Frank Coakley, who was the extremely reactionary right-wing District Attorney who had held that office for about sixteen years. I knew Jensen fairly well, having tried a murder case against him, in which he was prosecutor. I didn't know Meese at all because Meese wasn't in court very much. Meese spent most of his time in Sacramento as a lobbyist for the Police Officers' Association, and the D.A.'s Association, trying to get tougher legislation. The joke used to be that he was trying to get the Legislature to prescribe the dealth penalty for posession of mari juana... Well, when I learned that the police were coming, there was nothing more for me to do. I was expecting them to come through the front door, but they didn't -- they went up from the basement, bypassing the main floor. I started to leave the building the same way I entered, the side entrance. Just as I got to the entrance, which was next to the press room, I saw the sheriff of the county, Sheriff Madigan, reading a statement to the press. There were about a dozen reporters in there. I was anxious to hear that statement, so I stopped and listened, and he was telling about how the governor had authorized the police to come in to maintain order. And at that point I heard Meese come up from behind, and he said, "Sheriff, there's somebody here who is not a member of the press." So I turned around and said, "Well, that makes three of us." The sheriff didn't think it was funny, and he sort of pushed me into the arms of a cop who grabbed me and handcuffed me from behind ... I heard the sheriff say to Meese, who was still behind me, "Should we arrest him?" And Meese said, "Yes." I was the first person arrested. I went to Santa Rita [jail] with the first batch, which included Mario Savio and other important people. They refused to let me be released on my own recognizance as I expected, and I was treated just like any of the other prisoners. I was charged in the same way. As a matter of fact, when I got to Santa RIta I was put in a solitary cell with about three others. And for some reason, they took my shoes off, maybe fearing that I would try to kill myself with my shoelaces of something like that. [Laughs] Well, anyway, I was in there until...around ten o'clock the next morning. Decca: When the call came from Mario Savio, we were playing Scrabble and Bob had just put a "Q" down. I don't know if you play Scrabble, but a Q is very rare and it was also on a triple-word score. Bob went down thinking he'd be only an hour, then calls later to say he'd been arrested by Ed Meese. Before he came home the next morning, I removed the Q from the board...He never expressly stated forgiveness for removal of the Q. Some things are beyond forgiveness, I fear. The Making of a Muckraker by Jessica Mitford
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Bettina F. Aptheker, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became A Feminist Rebel (Seal Press, 2006; New York: Perseus Books)This is a very short excerpt from the memoir that contains two extensive chapters on the Free Speech Movement. Cited with permission of the author. pp139-140: "Meanwhile, Max wanted to act as a sort of 'special advisor,' in his capacity as chair of the Communist Party of Northern California. He and I met regularly and surreptitiously--'[f]or security reasons,' as Max put it. The abuse had ended by then. Max and I met in the bleachers of a deserted ballpark in Oakland. He insisted on this location, although it seemed to me that we stood out to an absurd degree. He expressed none of the doubts and hesitations of those in my party club. He said nothing about recruiting or advancing the party. Instead, he urged strategies that would build and sustain the broadest possible support for the FSM, both on and off campus. What he emphasized to me was how much power the regents, the governor, and the police had, and how much support we would need to defeat them." |
Jo Freeman, At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Education of an Activist, 1961-1965 (Indiana University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 2004), page 177
Cited with permission of the author. During the sit-in around the car, Marilyn Noble, a grad student at Sacramento State College, had walked up to Mario and asked him “Who does your laundry?” Somewhat taken aback, he stuttered, “I—I do.” “Not anymore, she said. Marilyn quickly became housemother and housekeeper of Central, making sure that there was food, clean clothers, and places on the floor to sleep for everyone who needed them.
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| Jo Freeman, At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Education of an Activist, 1961-1965 (Indiana University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 2004), page 193 Cited with permission of the author. Michael Rossman was a mathematician of many talents, from many places. Originally from Colorado, he finished high school in San Francisco and spent two years at the University of Chicago before coming to Cal in 1958. At 25, he was probably the oldest member of the Steering Committee and the only one in the leadership who had been in the 1960 HUAC demonstrations. |
| Administrative Pressures and Student Political Activity at the University of California A Preliminary Report Copyright © 1964 by Michael Rossman and Lynne Hollander (Rossman-Hollander Report): 10/28/1964 |
| Michael Rossman was the original collector and organizer of the Free Speech Movement Archives. |
| The Birth of the Free Speech Movement, Michael Rossman, 10/3/1964 |
| What led to the FSM? by Michael Rossman |
11/26/1964, San Francisco Examiner, Behind the Scenes at UC, Ed Montgomery,
07/02/14
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You can hear Barbara Dane sing here on KPFA recordings of 10/1 & 2/1964 Sproul Rally. Barbara sang FSM-customized versions of Go Tell It On The Mountain, It Isn’t Nice, and I’m On My Way. She said in part: "...it was a long time there in the early fifties especially when you couldn’t seem to get a rise out of anybody about anything, cause everybody thought they had to play it safe, play it cool, don’t take part, and I want to say that I as a waiter and watcher and prodder and hoping that things would get moving again, I want to thank you all for being here. It’s marvelous." |
Human Dignity and the Multiversity by Neal Blumenfeld, M.D. (Berkeley Psychiatrist) 10/12/2004, Berkeley Daily Planet, Psychiatrist's Encounter With FSM Shaped Life, Richard Brenneman
6/26/2008, Berkeley Daily Planet, Confrontation at Stadium Triggers New Arrests, Richard Brenneman
12/18/2013, Berkeleyside, Neal Blumenfeld: Psychiatrist, citizen of the world, Guest contributor
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John Leggett |
 November 20, 1964: March to Regents' Meeting L to R: Mona Hutchin, Ron Anastasi, ... John Leggett, John Searle, Michael Rossman, Jack Weinberg, Sallie Shawl, Mario Savio, Ken Cloke. Bob Johnson photo ©FSM Archives All rights reserved |
Michael Tigar |
So we sat in the sun, and the dialogue continues, and there's so much information: historical resumes, California State Supreme Court decisions, and such. And somebody who'd been active in the old days, a law student, Michael Tigar, got up on top of the car. Those of us who had been active with him were very glad to see him. And he tells us about this book that Clark Kerr wrote in the late fifties, called Tbe Managerial Revolution, and he gives us a summary of Kerr's thesis: There are the managed and the managers. The University is part of the managerial society. It's this big ship; and the ship has got a captain; and the captain is the President; and what he says goes. And Tigar says, "We thought the only place this kind of thinking was left in the world after the 1920's was in Mussolini's Italy." But he goes on talking about this book, as if it really meant something to talk about a book, as if these ideas and a rational counter-argument to them had some real use, which is very hard to believe after you've been around a University for eight years and gotten concerned about things, and had the spirit beaten down in you. At the end, Tigar says, "I don't want to be coarse, but there's one thing that's got to be said. People have been talking like this is just a little thing. But I want to say, even if they cut 'em off one at a time, it's still castration." And that's the truth, and it was good to hear someone say it in so many words. The Birth of the Free Speech Movement by Michael Rossman |
The Clergy: |
| On the FSM-A Site: Religious Voices |
Hillel Rabbi Joseph Gumbiner: see Through Their Eyes: Memories of Berkeley Hillel, Ida Frank, 1994, Judah L. Magnes Museum, pxxii and elsewhere: |
Go to Free Speech Movement Archives
page created 11/4/2021
September 16, 1964: Daily Californian, page 1, top: Slate Supplement
