American Experience; 1964; Interview with Robert Cohen, Historian, part 1 of 2

You know, this is trying to put 10 pounds of crap in a five-pound bag. I'm trying to do the entire year, 19, twice a year. I know it's impossible. Yeah. And it's just like a fire hose of information. Yeah. So, well, what the free speech movement basically, the main thing is to see how it's connected to the sole rights movement. You know, how it's linked to what happened before, and then creates a space for the anti-war movement after. That's the main thing, yeah. And do these interconnections really help you? Yeah, you don't need a micro-history of the movement. You need to think about what was larger meaning to us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so, how old am I? How old am I? I'm 56. Yeah. I was only a little kid when this happened. So, I'm a historian of it. I didn't actually live through it. So, I was four years old, five years old. So, I can't ask you where you were when you've heard about the death of JFK. Oh, I do know whether it was when you happened. Yeah, sure. I was four, and I remember. Yeah. It was one of my first really interestingly strong memories.

But where were you? Well, I grew up in Brooklyn. I grew up in Brooklyn. I was on the street. And I had a friend, I had a friend Barbara Pinsky, her brother, his name Kenny. And she said Kenny died. I thought she said Kenny died. I thought she said Kenny died. I said, what happened to Kenny? So, that was when, and my other memory was the, we had like a black maid, and she was crying, and she thought that he would be saved because something the priest had gone to see him, and she thought he was going to be okay. And so, you know, I just remember that. It's one of the first time I saw an adult cry. So, it was very, you know, a very, very dramatic moment in a way. Yeah, I guess I was. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I, I guess if I was four, I probably would have been in nursery school, or being here, or something. And I remember coming home, and my mom opened the door, and she was crying. And that was a huge shock to me. And I said, what's the matter, mommy, or something?

She said a good friend died. And she ran back to the toilet. And it stayed with me. It was just amazing. And I remember everybody watching the funeral on TV. That was a real big thing, because we nobody ever had the TV on for that long period of time. Yeah. 93% of Americans won. Right. Yeah. That was one of them, yeah. Did something start? What is it about November 22nd, that's such a huge watershed moment? Well, there's just, November 22nd was the sort of the death of this idea that change could come from the top, I think, for a lot, at least for the people who were in the movement. Yeah. The idea that not all of them had hope in Kennedy anyway. But I think the idea that, you know, you get a youthful, different, vigorous president. And now you have, you're getting Lyndon Johnson is an old-time, old-side politician. So I think that hope was very much, I don't know, was died with Kennedy to some degree.

So I think that's part of it. And you might say that a lot of stuff had followed the sort of the riff between establishment liberalism and the youth movement that, which has a generational feel, would have been far different, I think, if you had such a young president. So, but I think a lot of the people in the movement would not have said that. There's a lot of disappointment with Kennedy from the civil rights people. Mario Savio himself felt disappointed with Kennedy. So, you know, they felt that the Kennedy administration would be very slow to help the civil rights movement and have been too reluctant to help, you know, didn't want to offense influential Southern politicians. Because the Democratic Party had been the party of Jim Crow. So it depends on who you're talking to. I think some people who had hopes and expectations around the Kennedy's felt crushed by it. Others who already disappointed with it, you know, they were upset too. And the president should never be killed like that. But, you know, they never had those huge expectations to begin with.

Mario Savio, by the way, had been disappointed, you know, he was kind of a science geek. And he was disappointed that Kennedy had, like corporate, he had, I just say, like he kind of contracted with a private corporation to do the satellite technology tell star. And he felt disappointed with that. That Kennedy he thought was more flash and substance over that issue. Which is kind of unusual. Yeah. Keep forgetting how incredibly narrow Kennedy's margin of victory was and how hamster he was. Right, yeah. If you could think about America the day before Kennedy is killed, just think about looking down on it from some Olympian place or walking through it. It's a very black and white, much more cute, warmest world than probably we think. Do you think of the 60s as being technicaler and what we actually think of as the 70s? Right.

In other words, how have you set up the world that's about to change? Well, I think the issue about whether, whether how the world was in 63 depends upon. I think a lot of people would say that we're still wearing out of the 50s completely. Well, you know, the question is when did the 1950s end? And I think a lot of people would say, well, we were still in the Cold War. There's still a lot of tension that was around in the Cold War. The counterculture really hadn't developed yet. That it was very much a, you know, it was a very, we still had segregation in the South. That this was still not the, the 60s did not exist as we know them yet. So I think that the question that you're asking is a good one. I think that it's a, the 50s had not really, really in some way had an ended yet. I mean, there were, there are, of course, rumblings from the sit-ins of the freedom rides. And, you know, the civil rights movement, the freedom movement was going to shake things up. But that had, it was still brewing and it hadn't reached everybody yet. So I think that, and the campuses were quite assent. So, I mean, most of the campuses were. So I don't think that you'd, you know, you would feel that 60s that, as we think of it, existed yet.

That's right. Like, America hadn't taken its coat and jacket off yet, you know, there was a, I mean, the coat and tie off yet. There's not, that really hadn't happened yet. Morales obvious, growing a coat and tie during the purchase. That's right, yeah, during, well during the, they got dressed up to go to the region speeding. And that's, that's a sign too that, you know, there wasn't yet, they were still, you know, that, the, between what we think about the 60s and the late 60s and the 50s, that, that hadn't burst yet. That was just the beginning. But people would, so people would actually dress up to go to the region speeding. What do you, what do you, if you look at youth at that moment, what's going on? What are they represent? And what are they, in what ways are they different from the kids that had come before? Do you mean during the free speech moment or before or just? Youth in general in November of 63 or in January 1st, 1964. They're like, they're like the first wave of the young big of the baby.

Yeah, yeah. What is it about them that's such going to be such fertile ground for action? Well, there's so many of them, number one. So I think there's a feeling that you have power, you know, that you have a certain power from numbers to, to really affect history. So that's, that's one piece of the baby boomer, the sort of baby boomer, just the, the sheer size of the generation is part of it. I think also there was a sense that, you know, that the portion of the generation was already making history. That is just, you know, almost the decade begins. It's great for historians, you know, February 1960. You have the sit-ins, right? So the young people are leading politically. And that's not really true. Usually with the old left in the 30s, it was adults and political parties. You had to work your way up and people in middle age. They were the ones that made history. In the 60s, that had already begun to change. That the driving force is sort of the largest, sort of moral force that was trying to shake up America. The Black Freedom Movement was, even though today we focus on King, it really was, was, was, was really sparked up by the students, by young people.

I think Howard Zinsett, you know, for the first time in America, in America's history, the social movement that was shaking America to its core was being led by young people. So that's, that's part of it, you know, I think is politically. Culturally, there's still these ramifications from rock and roll. There's this addictive youth culture as well. But I think, I think there were, in other words, like, there is this something brewing there already. It's a large generation. There's already science. Is it rich? Yeah, what is affluent? Well, it's, you know, it's mixed. To generalize a whole generation, whole generation is problematic, you know, because there's, there are people who became active who were very working, Mario himself, his father was a machinist. So you can't trace everybody's activism to affluence. But the affluence, I think, gave people a sense that they weren't so tense about, you know, if I go out into this demonstration, I'm not going to be able to get a job. If I get suspended from this school, am I going to be in trouble? There's, there's a lot of jobs out there. So I think that creates a kind of sense of, of, of, that you have, not vulnerable, but you're not so vulnerable as people are during recessions.

And that you feel as if you can, you can act and make a difference. So I think that the affluence does, does, you know, help the movement along. It's cheap, you know, that you can live at a university community from almost nothing, you know, to pay tuition. That's very different from today when students have to work full time. They're heavily in debt. That's a very different world from back then. Like the free speech movement, they're meetings. Sometimes they had meetings that went on for, they had a consensus decision-making process that could span 24 hours. Students today, you can't even schedule them for 15 minutes, because they're working. So that gives you a kind of foot loose and fancy free quality that allows political space for, you know, all kinds of organizing or other things that you're doing. So I think that, that makes a big difference, I think. Yeah, cool. I thought we talked a little bit about politics, too, for Johnson Goldwater, I had you a little bit, if you want to go there. Sure, sure, yeah, yeah. So is there a political consensus in a way?

Well, I think there was a sense that in, by 64, there was a sense that this is basically a liberal nation. And conservatives were seen as being, you know, a fringe, especially after Goldwater, you know, got smashed in the 64 election. But even before that, there wasn't a sense that conservatives, you know, this has been an era shaped by the New Deal. Eisenhower hadn't undone the New Deal. You know, the top tech straight was in the 90s percentile during the Eisenhower era. So I don't think that, you know, you really have a sense that there is a very strong movement conservatism like there is today, or there would have been the 80s, or even by the late 60s. So the idea is that, you know, it's basically a liberal nation. And that's the, you know, go ahead. My dad's roommate at Harvard was Elliot Richardson. Mm-hmm. And so I grew up with the idea that Republicans were around. Well, there was also a very strong moderate and liberal piece to the Republican Party.

Not like today. You could be a, in fact, a lot of the judges who made the most pro civil rights appointments in the Fifth Circuit in the South were Republican judges. You know, that's still the party of Lincoln. There still is that, you know, it's not really affecting the top leadership. Like Eisenhower regretted having appointed Earl Warren, he said, it was called his greatest mistake. But I'm talking about these judges themselves. You, there was a moderate and even a liberal wing in the Republican party. So it's very different today. That's the point. There isn't like a right-wing party. And that's why there was a huge fight when Roosevelt got nominated within the Republican Party. And that's part of the reason why he got, you know, really smashed, you know, that he didn't even have the support of the Republican sounds. You said Roosevelt. Oh gosh. No, no, gold water. Yeah, yeah, yeah, gold water. That's right. Yeah, well, so we'll get to that. Okay, sure. So Johnson, you know, he inherits the presidency in probably the worst way imaginable. Mm-hmm. The job he's wanted and his entire life and lived for. What he does is pretty remarkable.

Five days after he takes office, he gives a big speech in the well of the house. Mm-hmm. What does Johnson decide to do? And why is that so noteworthy? Well, Johnson really wanted to be a second Roosevelt. You know, he had grown, his background was, he was the Texas leader of the National Youth Administration. He saw himself as FDR's favorite congressman. And I think he saw his work as finishing the job that Kennedy had set out to do, but didn't have the legislative skills to get done. And Johnson, having been the majority leader, did have those skills. So he's using the Kennedy, the sort of aura and the martyrdom of President Kennedy to kind of enact this liberal agenda and not being able to be realized under Kennedy. And he started to, you know, to use that and say we're going to finish that work. And it's not really clear that the Kennedy was, you know, set out to go as far as Johnson did. So I think that I see Johnson is trying to become like a second FDR and to kind of, you know, go further.

That is not just a new deal to rescue society from a depression, but to build a great society and win a war on poverty, much more sweeping and ambitious because you could do this during a period of affluence. So I think that's, you know, they're really distinguished. Of course, what's tragic about Johnson is that Vietnam got in the way of that. He was very, I think, a very expansive and creative thinker domestically, but on foreign policy, you know, was really hopelessly conventional and really kind of overwhelmed. And so I think he, the sort of the Cold War, the Cold War, you're pieced to him, he couldn't break free of it. So it's kind of a sad, a very sad character in that way. Yeah, I think Robert Carrot is so smart to be invested in the multi-volume approach to Johnson because he's the most Shakespearean, the most deeply kind of tragic figure. I mean, Nixon is fascinating in his own dark, Machiavellian way, but Johnson, I mean, the scale of his ambition. Yeah, I think it's, yeah, yeah.

And the thing is that what's sad about it is that, you know, to actually even talk in this kind of very direct way about poverty. That comes out of Roosevelt. You know, we said one third of, I see one third of a nation ill-closed, ill-housed, ill-fed. Johnson was in the same way. We're going to confront these issues. We're going to try to win this war on poverty. And so it's a very, it's a sweeping ambition, the idea that you could do that. No politician today would dare to say that and never mind think he could do it. So yeah, and to have these high expectations and start out, so strongly, and win such an enormous landslide, and then four years later to really be a political wreck and the country, you know, so polarized and divided, it's quite sad. And it has to do, of course, with, you know, not really being able to rethink these Cold War assumptions that took us into Vietnam. And go ahead, go ahead. Who were the young Americans for freedom? And what, what were they so unhappy about? Well, they were, they basically were,

Oh, so who, sorry, the young Americans for freedom were these junior conservatives who were, this is on, they created that share on statement on the lawn of Bill Buckley's mansion in Connecticut. And they felt as if, you know, that the liberal establishment too compromising in the Cold War. And they wanted, you know, like to roll back communism and just this whole anti-status thing. And if you look at their statement, it's, you know, very, students love it because only two pages long. But they say, well, why do we need a mass movement to do this? We already are anti-communists. You know, what, what's the point of this? And I think the point of it is that they wanted to push, push to the extreme. That is to, you know, they're opposed to the liberal state. The Cold War has to be won. We have to get the big government off our backs. And so that was there, you know, kind of going at it from, they're going at liberal, I mean, if you think about the new left is going after liberalism from the left. And what, the young Americans freedom are really going at it from the right. The thing is that when I read their stuff, though,

what I think they're obviously really missing is the sort of defining moral issue of the 60s, which is the struggle against Jim Crow. That's not mentioned in their, in their, this share on statement or in their literature. And it becomes like, you know, really what's, you miss that, you really miss something hugely important. And if you're anti-status, you know, the big government, what is the big government trying to do in the 60s? One of the most important things is trying to do is to try to come to grips with this whole tradition of racial inequality. And if you're opposed to that, then you sort of really, you know, you just weren't present at what was going on. The most important thing going on in your decade. And yeah, they're a real force and they are intensely motivated. And they're looking for something that they don't have. They're looking for a standard bearer. Well, I think you're right. They why if is looking for something that don't have an standard bearer, and they find it in very gold water, right? So they are able to sort of remake the Republican Party, but they're not able to really get a massive consistency

on college campuses. They're not able to inspire their generation of young people. Their success was more long-term. You know, they're seating what was going to later on be the Reagan Revolution. But in the 60s, they looked like, you know, they were sort of always responding to what the new left was doing. In fact, they had like this kit that they gave out about how to oppose the student left. So they were in a sense reacting to the new left. They weren't really defining a new agenda on campus. It's different off campus because what they're trying to do is remake the Republican Party. And it was a disaster in 64. It didn't work at all. But, you know, in a long term, obviously, it made possible what was going to come later. And by the way, this is also a debate I should mention among historians. So I think it's important about how do we understand conservatism? Is it like this idealistic anti-status that's going to correct us for the excesses of the welfare state? Or is it something that's really about a backlash against the social changes of the 60s that's really about intolerance? You know, like in other words, trying to roll back what was changed by the civil rights movement and the woman's movement and the new left and the anti-war movement.

And so how do we understand this upsurge of the right that really got going with Nixon or at a fall start with Goldwater or the carried Reagan to the White House ultimately? And first, the governor's measurement. How did Reagan rise up to become governor? Well, they ran up, importantly, the resentment against what happened at Berkeley and against Watts, crusading against welfare queens. So, you know, Dan Wallace, a Dan Carter, as a book about George Wallace, where he ends up by saying that calling George Wallace the most influential loser in 20th century American politics. And what he meant by that, you know, Wallace was too crudely racist to ever become president. But he ran against these points he had to bureaucrats and this resentment against Washington and Goldwater tapped into that too. But there was a racial undercurrent to that. That's not the only thing that's going on, but it is significant. So, I think we also have to kind of think about, when we think about conservatism, you know, the YF, you just look at its statements, it can seem like, well, it's kind of interesting

and in some ways, new leftist revolt against mainstream liberalism. But I think there's also kind of an undercurrent there that, within the right, that also is, really frankly, anti-democratic. I mean, what was the first violence on a college campus in the 1960s? It wasn't from the new left. It was from the right. They were rioting against having black students come to the University of Georgia in 61, to the University of Mississippi in 62. I mean, really large groups of people were rioting against having this sort of basic democratic change. I don't mean to tar all people on the right with this, but it's a part of it. So, the right, I think, you understand, it's roll in the 60s, you have to think about what George Wallace was doing, why he was getting, why in the presidential elections that he ran in the 60s was he attracting votes even from the north. Right, right. That's all good back then. That's really good back. Mm-hmm. SDS is, I can't find a friggin' thing that they do in 1964 anchor them narratively. I think that it was in 1965 they do a pretty important get-not, and to get-not thing.

Yeah, well I think what they did was in 1962 with the Port Huron statement to kind of help define what this generation is going to be thinking, you know, like to help to lay the foundation for what's going to come later. But the recent- Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Sharon versus Port Huron says everything you need to know, right? Yeah, yeah. What did Tom Hayden and this group of people do with that? Briefly, if you can. Like, how does it define the new left? Well, a few things. First of all, it says that affluence alone is not enough. You know, we're looking on the world uncomfortably. You know, we've been raised in affluence, but we're not comfortable with where we sit, because we see all this inequality. So that's one thing is saying, well, it's almost like this existential thing. It's not about you materially. It's like, where's the meaning making in life? You know, so that's-that's one piece of it. That's a feeling of dissatisfaction. You can grow up in the suburbs and be affluent, but also with a very sterile existence. So that's part of it. The other thing is about trying to push beyond labels to really get at,

how do we have a more democratic and participatory political culture? That was the-you think about the most important ideas that came out of the Port Huron statement. It's the idea of participatory democracy. And that idea, once it was planted, began to have a lot of influence among lots of people in the generation. Now, the reason why, which you'd mentioned, you aren't able to find them doing much in 64, is that first, they're not doing much. They're mostly doing manifesto writing. They're more like thinking. It's almost like a debating society. That's not entirely fair, because some of them, like Tom Hayden, was involved in the Freedom Rides. But basically, what's going to happen is the student movement against racism and the South, is going to help push them and model for them how to become activists themselves, how to go beyond manifesto writing to begin actually organizing on a message. And that happens. The reason why it doesn't quite work chronologically for you is that that really starts to get going in the spring of 65. But go ahead. The two statements just in terms of their length and scope are sort of a portrait of the left and right, right? Oh, sure.

Oh, sure. Well, the portrait on statement, I mean, the right is really just trying to... The chairman is two pages. Right, that's right. The board here on is like 30 pages. Well, because they have a whole, you know, a much broader agenda for change. I mean, the fact that matter is that the right wanted just things to go a little further in terms of escalating what we're doing on the Cold War, you know, sort of trying to stop the welfare stay from doing as much as it was doing. But that's not a very extensive agenda. Whereas the left was trying to rethink whole education, health care, the political party system, the economic structure. So it's very sweeping and broad. And trying to do it by also, I have to say, in a way that's not old fashioned ideological. Trying to stay away from sort of Marxist phrasing. Trying not to sound like the old left so that you can speak to people in their own language. Yeah. You know, so that you can communicate with... Like you were talking before about being able to communicate with ordinary people, rather than, you know, some radical theoreticians. Yeah.

And it's also easier to just say we're against... We want less of everything. Whereas the other burden is much more complicated, which is to sort of say here is what we think we can become. That's right. And also the other thing I want to mention to you about the part you're on statement, it also looks critically at the university itself. Saying the university should become engaged with the political and social issues of our time. It shouldn't be just a place to get you jobs. It shouldn't be a place to retreat from the society. It should be a place where we start rethinking society. So a good piece of this is critique of the universities for, you know, putting young people to sleep. We want to use the universities to get people to think critically about society so they can push us towards genuine democracy and towards peace. And how does that start to play out in Berkeley, California? Well, in Berkeley, what happens is that the... I'd say that what really gets happening in Berkeley is the civil rights movement. It begins, you know, people tend to focus it on in the south. But it had a northern wing. The free speech movement really had a...

It was grew out of this mushrooming of the free speech movement of the civil rights movement in Berkeley. That is, there were all these sit-ins going on. What happened was Birmingham in 63, where there were over 100,000 people protesting, 20,000 arrested. The police dogs and all this... The attack on the civil rights protestors by both corners, goons on TV. Really upset lots of folks, including Mario. They're watching this on TV. And I think Mario said, it's shamed me to feeling like, why aren't I doing that? Look at that solidarity. Look at that courage that changed America. What am I doing about this? I think that kind of reaction was not very unusual. And so what you have, that's in 63. And in the spring of 64, they begin protesting against discrimination in all kinds of employers in the Bay Area. They started, actually, the end of 63 at Mel's Drive-In. In February of 64, they're doing these shop-ins, where they are trying to prevent, you know, there are these big, lucky supermarket chain that doesn't hire black people.

And so they do this thing where they get groceries in a shopping cart, bring it to the checkout line and just leave it there. Now, that was actually too radical a time for Mario, who wasn't really quite there yet. He thought that was too messy. But then, you know, kept going in March of 64, there was the sit-in at the Sheridan Palace. It's the biggest, you know, luxury hotel in San Francisco, where they weren't hiring black people in any positions where you could see them. Maybe a scullery maid, but not out in the public. So what's happening is that these northern students are being inspired by the southern freedom struggle and using civil disobedience to try to knock down all kinds of discrimination in their backyard. And that, by the way, then that in turn leads to the free speech movement because when that's happening, students are being arrested and there's pressure put on the university administration. How can the university be used as a center for social protests and social change and even a legal protest? Like when you're sitting in at the luxury hotel in San Francisco,

you're breaking the law. So you are using the university to, you know, to spark this outlaw behavior. That's how conservatives saw it. So there's a attempt to clamp down. That's one of the reasons there's a clamp down. And that leads to this huge battle over free speech. Well, let's get there. So change it very easily. Okay. Yeah, that's it. It's the non-campus. In other words, like the fight was a border fight about could you do this organizing? Sure. But I mean, it's kind of a testament to how repressive the place was still was. Yeah, ironic. So there's all this backstory, which you set up really well. Where does it, where does the free speech will come from? Well, I think it's linked, there's several things. One is, from the student angle, it's because they're becoming more activist. You were talking about the 64. Don't forget that it cares you to tell, remind our viewers what we're talking about. Oh, okay, sure. Okay, where the free speech will come from? I think we'd talk before about the 64 election.

This is a very politicized election between a very conservative candidate and a liberal candidate, right? People know it's going to be a really pivotal election. And so there's a lot of activism that's brewing. Okay, and so the question is, are students going to be able to participate in it? Are they going to be able to be a part of that conversation? And the Republican convention is that the Cow Palace and San Francisco and Berkeley students send the delegation to protest, they send these protesters, to protest against goldwater. They're supporting like a moderate candidate like Scranton and these pro civil rights. You know, one of the things about goldwater is against the civil rights act, so they are protesting and then the ill-contributing sends a reporter like how can they be organizing these kids to do partisan political activity when at university regulations about not doing partisan political activity from political advocacy from the college campus? Well, they're doing it right off campus, right? You're doing, there's a strip of sidewalk on bankruptcy telegraph where the students have these little card tables to do their organizing, right? And they think that's on city property.

It turns out, they're partially on campus property. And when that occurs, right, the reporter has reported that and the university administration gets very nervous that this is a violation of their own regulations, so they clamp down and close the free speech area. But if you step back, right, think about that. There's more free speech off campus than on campus. How did that happen? You know, it's sort of like the university had never snapped out of this kind of McCarthyist mindset. Berkeley, in particular, ever since the 30s, you know, there have been like a mini red scare in Berkeley in the 30s because of the general strike in the Bay Area in San Francisco. And so basically they had barred free speech from political advocacy from the campus, so it was always right off the campus. And so that's really a testament to how limited free speech was at Berkeley. And so one way to see the free speech movement, by the way, you can see it as kind of a launching pad of the new left and the student movement of the 60s. The other way is to see it as the culmination or the last act of the Cold War McCarthyist 1950s and 40s. Because you know, Berkeley had this big,

loyalty-other purge in the late 40s and 50s. And so the question is, you know, is the university California going to be a place where this free political discourse? Go ahead. So what's, the university is getting a lot of blowback from the community because of a lot of this. Because students are getting blowback from the community because students are breaking the law, sitting in against racial discrimination. And they're getting blowback from the community because the students were picketing at the Republican convention. So the question is, what's the university going to do about it? And the university, you know, California was used to making compromises on this and was pretty timid about this stuff. So they were just saying anything that's being organized from campus, you cannot organize it from the campus. It has to be off campus. And when they got that pressure, they tried to close down the free speech area. And here's why that didn't work. Because first of all, you're taking away a right that students felt they already had. That's one part of it. The second part of it is lots of them are veterans of the Bay Area free speech movement,

a civil rights movement. And by the fall of 64, people like Savio are veterans of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, where in the south, where he'd been, he, once you stood up to the clan in Mississippi, you're not going to be afraid of some dean telling you he's going to suspend you. So you had, like, you just think about it. In the midst of this, you know, at the first stage of the protest, when students were surrounding the police car, when they were trying to enforce the ban on free speech on campus, the police car comes to campus. Now, we've all seen police cars come around, but how many times do you see somebody climbing on top of the, you know, first of all, sitting in around it, and then Savio, somebody taking their shoes off and getting on top of the police car and using it as a podium? That is not the ordinary way things going, police cars come. So how did that happen? How was that possible? It was possible because the Black Freedom Movement gave people experiencing in challenging authority under really heavy-duty circumstances, like being threatened physically by whether the clan or deputies or whatever.

So this was like, you know, this is not the right group to challenge their rights. You know, take away their rights or the right time. Because by this time, they are, even though they're young, a lot more political experience than the people who are, you know, these middle-aged administrators who are trying to suppress them. That's one of the reasons it blew up. Yeah, Bob Moses said to me that a very simple mission. Their job was to go to Mississippi and survive. Mm-hmm. Hey, man, can we do a tiny bit of touch-up? Sure. Thank you, boss. I was going to say that there had been civil disobedience off campus before, both in the Bay Area and in the South. In fact, you know, going back to 1960, Black students had sat in at lunch counters off campus. So people, Bob Moses' generation of Black students, particularly at historically Black colleges in the South,

pioneered these civil disobedience off campus. But they hadn't brought it on to campus. Their targets wrote these off campus racist, discriminating, lunch counters and restaurants and all the rest. So what was going on at Berkeley that it was new was taking those tactics, non-violent civil disobedience, and bringing it on to campus. That was the first time this has really happened on a massive level like this. And so it moves from the private sector in a way for the governmental sphere to kind of be institutional, which carries with it a very different break. Well, yeah, I think it does move from this. Well, I would put it this way. You know, we're talking about how civil disobedience being used in Berkeley compares to what came before. First of all, the Black students, they knew that they're, even though they had paternalistic administrators, those administrators cared about them or on a mission to educate Black students. The students at Berkeley did not have that same sense of familial community. It's like, it's sort of like I'd say that Black students sitting in,

would be like sitting in your living room against your parents, right? This was different. It was a big and personal university that was seen as part of corporate America. And so it's different. You're willing to use those tactics that had only been used by the Black students off campus to bring them on campus. And here's the thing about it that's really important that is civil disobedience on campus. It's like the great equalizer. All of a sudden students who had no power on campus, you know, if you don't like something and the dean says it, you know, too bad. But what if you have a thousand students to go around and sit in around the dean's office? That's a very different situation. So what civil disobedience does on campus is it kind of empowers students. And students begin to see, even though obviously they're much more privileged, predominantly white campuses like Berkeley, that in the context of that institution, they were as voteless as disenfranchised in that context as blacks were in the South. They didn't have, they weren't consulted on policy. Where did this decision to close down the free speech area come from? They weren't asked about it.

They were just told. You can't have your car tables here anymore. Why? You know, because we say so. Is this something that's mandated by law? No, we have discretion. Well, if you have discretion and you have discretion, not to close down on the free speech area. And we think that free speech is an inherent part of what the university is supposed to be about. See, so once you've got that going, you have this, you know, it's very, very tough to turn that off. Yeah. Because students felt as if, you know, this, they, they would like to be empowered. And by the way, and then it leads, it goes beyond just the free speech that you yourself. You've been thinking about the university. Why should this large institution, supposed to be the vote of the education, operate so undemocratically? You know, why, if we're trying to get people ready to operate in a democratic society, why should this be run like a top-down corporation? So students are trying to think about, well, why isn't that the university is doing this? And they start talking about it as a knowledge factory, as like a big impersonal bureaucracy. And the symbol becomes like this, these IBM, those old fashioned computer cards, that said, you know, do not, was it, you know, is it's full spindle or mutilate? You know, it's like, you are, you're anonymous.

You really have no, no role in decision making. You're just like this little, little cog in the machine. So that's why that machine metaphor is there from the beginning of the free speech movement. And just since we're there, Savio picks up on it. What does he do? Well, Savio, and he's not alone, there's a whole group of people, but they, and by the way, the Savio story is really quite amazing, because you know, he had a very bad stammer, and all through his childhood and his adolescence, he really had a hard time getting his words out, so that for him, the moral crisis is this. He just had come back from Mississippi, where he'd risked his life, and been beaten up by the clan, registering blacks to vote, right? And comes back, and he feels like he wants, he, by the way, he ended up in Mississippi, because there was free speech at Berkeley. He'd been recruited, he'd been handed a hand-build to go to the demonstration at the Sheridan Palace against racism, and then he'd been arrested. He found out about a freedom summer in jail when he got arrested at Sheridan Palace. So that trail leads right back to that free speech area on the campus,

not shutting it down, to him felt like, wait, am I going to forget about what happened in Mississippi, now that I'm back in Peaceville, sunny California? Am I going to abandon that cause? Am I a Judas? No, I'm going to stand with them. So this became, it wasn't just free speech. It was free speech connected to the moral, the sort of moral crisis that the Civil Rights Movement was trying to address. So for him, this became like a really, it's almost like a, it's this crusade in a way, to try to write what's most wrong with America. The best thing, it's sort of like during the slavery times. Here we are in a free state. We can help the slave states. This is the freest part of America, it's supposed to be the university, and you're saying we can't recruit people to the Civil Rights Movement. How dare you, you see? That was the, that was the feeling. So it sparks this outrage, and suddenly Mario, who had such trouble speaking, all of a sudden it comes out, and he becomes like this incredibly eloquent order that's articulating what everybody's thinking about, you know, how outrageous it is,

that they're stopping us from, from, that is, we Berkeley students from assisting in this, this historic freedom struggle in the South. So it's a really, it's a moral cause. It runs very deep. There's some technicality about, you know, where does the border of campus start, and the city begin? It's about, what kind of society is this? If you're saying we can't, we can't unite to try to stop racism. Great. What's he actually saying? Not saying, because we'll show the speech. But there is this moment when that machine, that alienated metaphor, comes out. It sort of feels like it's almost the culmination of the whole movement, because it's, it's, it's after, it's after the occupation. Yeah, that's, that's right towards the end. In fact, some ways that speech was very unusual, the anger and the emotion in it, because usually what Savio did and these organizers did, they were explaining to each other what the issue was.

Why is this so important? What are we going to do from here? It's a very, you know, sort of a very descriptive kind of oratory. It's not usually a metaphorical, it's not usually angry in that, as angry as that. It's usually like, let's organize together. Maybe we can solve this problem. And at the beginning, they thought it was so outrageous. They thought the administration would back down. You know, so actually, if you look at a chronologist, can we just go for the chronology real briefly? I mean, they come down on the free speech of these new restrictions in mid-September. The students, unlike these images of the 60s, they don't like snap their finger and go out and have a sit-in. They tried to negotiate for two weeks with the deans. And it's only when it is clear that the administration will not really move on this issue that then they move towards civil disobedience. And so essentially what happens is they decide that they're going to defy the regulations by moving, you know, here it is. They usually have the free speech area at the edge of campus, right? And it's been banned from there. And all of a sudden, they're saying, wait a second. If you're going to ban it there, you know, if we can't, if we can't have it there, well, then you're saying we can't have anywhere.

So we're going to take the free speech area right from the edge of the campus. I move it right to the center in front of Sproul Hall. And that's what they did. And the second day they did this in October 1st, they brought the police car up to try to arrest one of the protesters who were trying to raise money for the civil rights movement. And so essentially what happens is that some people, some of you, they're all starting to say now, these are our free speech rights and that we should be able to do this anywhere on campus as long as we don't disrupt the campus. So go ahead. It's a great moment when, you know, Weinberg is in the car and has this sort of classic sort of spontaneous thing and they get, they get, you know, the consensus approach, everybody gets a chance to talk. Even like the fraternity comes up trying to make it up. That's right. Which is a really great sort of symbol of exactly. Well, it was a very democratic, yeah, you're right. You know, they did let everybody come speak. It was a very democratic thing.

It was very open. And the thing about that was, the other part of it is that we have to remember is the sense of community. The only reason why the students were able to have this leverage to get their voices heard was because this huge crowd of them had sat in around the police car. So everybody counted. It was this incredible sense of community. Remember, they've been this big and personal university and all of a sudden this incredible sense of community created around that police car. And at first, students for goldwater were there. Yeah, initially, initially there was support from the right as well. That was the thing about the free speech movement. Initially, it went from the far left all the way to the right because everybody valued free speech. Where the goldwater rights tended to jump off was on, actually, you know, civil disobedience itself and taking over buildings, that made them nervous. But initially, it was a full, in fact, before it was called the free speech movement, it was called the United Front. The United Front, which meant that all these student groups were a part of it because all of them cared about free speech. But I also want to say that, okay, so they surround the police car,

right, and it lasts over 32 hours. And it looks like the police might come and, you know, there could be like a Mississippi style disaster there. But the last minute, there's a negotiated settlement that's really just deferring the controversy. Two committees are formed to figure out, okay, what about the rules? What about the students who are suspended? What are we going to do? And so there then is almost, there are three weeks, almost a month, in which there are these hearings of this campus committee on political activity, where the three sides of students, the administration, and the faculty are trying to sort these things out. So again, contrary to the image of the 60s, is all protest and radical insurgency. Here they're trying to talk it out. But ultimately it turns out, the university will not compromise on. Or wants to compromise free speech. And that's unacceptable. And so what I wanted to get back to that speech we're asking you about was, these events are happening. It's September and October. Civil disobedience resumes in November. And then the suspensions happen right at Thanksgiving, where they really seem to have,

the administration seems to have broken their word to the protesters by having this very vindictive, disciplinary action against them. And so is that emotion where you feel like the movement may be winding down, we may be losing, that all of a sudden, this, what they would call an atrocities committed by the administration with these suspensions. And then you have this idea, we're going to have an occupied administration building. That's the context for Savio's speech, why it's so emotional. Because it's this pivotal moment after a whole semester of having to stop your studies, organize non-stop, protest, you know, negotiate, and still you can't get the right to free speech. That's kind of infuriating. That's why there's so much emotion there. You feel like at one point in November, before that speech was given, that is a few weeks before the hat was called the aborted sit-in, where they were so frustrated, they wanted to have a sit-in before the campus was really ready for it. And it didn't work, not many people showed up. And so, again, part of that emotion in that speech is the sense that, you know, we might lose. And this is our last chance, and the anger that the administration had been playing these games

for the whole semester. Go ahead. I know that's too long. That's great to have. The other thing, by the way, is that they won. I mean, that's the thing we have to talk about, too. Yeah, that's unusual. Let's try to sort of wrap it up about that. Yeah. You know, a little tighter ball. The sit-in, I mean, the occupation happens. 800 people are arrested. So, sum that up, and then, if you can, briefly. And how does it conclude? Well, the occupation in December of 1964 is interesting in a number of ways. First of all, it's not like a takeover of the building where they storm the building, right? It's sort of like almost like a wedding, you know, where people are marching slowly in, joined by as a singing, we shall overcome.

It's not like a hijacking, right? It's like a nonviolent occupation of the building that follows Mario's speech. So, that's important to keep in mind. Remember, this is the early 60s still nonviolent, right? And so, even, you know, people are, if you look at their marching in, they're not racing in. You know, it's not a violent, okay, that's number one. The second thing was that when the occupation occurred, going back to that police car, the sense of community inside there was amazing. You know, people were holding freedom school, freedom of school classes. They were, it was the time of Hanukkah students are doing the horror. There's all kinds of things happening. Poetry's being read, films are being shown. It's like they are doing all this educational reform work right in the building. And then, of course, early in the morning, there's this police invasion. And we're just hundreds of students, about 800 altogether, are dragged, and some of them are dragged down the stairs, some are taken through the elevators. There's a mass arrest. And then when that happens, whoa,

this is the, remember, this is the largest mass arrest in American history. By far, the largest mass arrest ever on a college campus. And the faculty, and here's what you have to understand about the free speech movement. There's a tug of war going on all semester about who's going to have the loyalty of the faculty, the administration, or the students. Usually faculty are loyal to their institution. And even though they didn't love the administration, they tend to call them all-state. These blue suits, like their insurance agents. There was all this, you know, faculty resentment of the administration. They were slow to abandon them. The faculty tend to have institutional loyalty that they're there for the long term. But now, the police have come and arrested their students. Right? There's been a police invasion of their campus. And there's a lot of anger about that. And the administration is really kind of, has kind of discredited itself. The faculty start meeting. And all of it, that there's been a progressive part of the faculty. Some have been through the loyalty oath. Some were the younger, like a progressive faculty, trying to organize the support free speech all semester. And they had been a minority. But now, that's going to change.

And what happens is, the administration knows it's in trouble. So they have this meeting at the Greek theater, where they have this compromise on free speech with they're trying to have the department chairs, you know, present. It's a meeting in which the political science chair, Robert Scalapino speaks, and so does Clark Kerr. And they don't invite the students to speak. Savio asks, it's just a think of this. The whole semester, it's all about student rights. They have no student invited to speak. And in fact, when Savio says, he asks Kerr, can I speak? No, you have to, I'm not in charge of this meeting, Kerr says. You have to ask Professor Scalapino. So Savio asks Scalapino, and Scalapino says, no, this is a structured meeting, it's an agenda. And, you know, that's already set. You can't speak. And so just think about that. You have a meeting to settle a free speech crisis in which you're gagging the students. And that all comes to, you know, really a head at that talk. Because what Savio decided was that, not Savio, but the free speech movement, some of the leaders of it,

Bettina was involved in this as well. Well, it was saying, Savio's I'm going to speak at that meeting. No matter what. Now, again, because this is still the early 60s and not, we're not going to divide, we're not going to, the institute to pry view of your rights. So in other words, let them all speak. And that's what they did. Scalapino spoke, Kerr spoke. Curse spoke and talked about this new, this compromise in this new era of the university was going to enter of reason and no coercion. And the next thing note, Mario is slowly walking up, and this is Batina's suggestion. At first they thought maybe he'd race up, but slowly walking up to the stage and going to the podium, and the police jump him and take him away by his tie. And all of a sudden, right before these 7,000 people in the audience, you have symbolized right there the whole issue. Here's the student, one of the student leaders of the free speech movement, he's being dragged away from the podium, and like pandemonium breaks loose. And so basically that did, if the sit-in itself and the mess arrest didn't do enough in the spread of the administration, this was like, you know, right before everybody's eyes. They're totally the spread of the administration.

So the next day on December 8th, 64, the faculty meet and vote by a 7-to-1 margin, right? It wasn't like a representative. It was the huge faculty meeting of 800 faculty members, members voted to back the basic free speech demand of the free speech movement that the content of speech shall not be regulated by the university. So that is, you know, was getting winning the faculty. That doesn't mean the faculty was radical. It just meant that, you know, the university had to be a freer place. But there's another, there's a little political context. Can I just say one other thing or you want to go on? One of the things about this, we're a fits into your larger concerns about the 60s, is that you had this issue about the breakage, the sort of fracturing of liberals from radicals. You know, like Atlantic City, where Bob Moses and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party were trying to integrate, get a black interracial delegation with black student, black Mississippi into the Democratic National Committee as representatives. And then Johnson turns that down. They give them a symbolic cedar too. And so basically, it made the freedom movement in Mississippi feel that liberals were really just phony, right? Remember, Kerr is a, Kerr is a liberal, right? So here you have this situation where you're having students who are supposedly, who are championing free speech, fighting a liberal administrator over free speech.

Why is a liberal opposing free speech for his own students? That's part of the issue about this, this break between liberals and radicals. And I think part of it is that when it came to free speech and other issues, liberals at this point weren't all that liberal by our standards. You know, it's like establishment liberals. And so, in a sense, if you think about it, even though the left was very critical about liberalism, in terms of the demands, they were better liberals than the liberals were. They're saying, let people speak freely. So that's one of the things that's really striking. Now, in terms of the impact, you know, what you have is that because people off campus don't understand what's going on, they're not thinking, wow, these kids are great, they're standing up for free speech. They're saying, they're thinking, because the press is very biased against, most of the press is very biased against them. They're thinking these kids are rioting, they're disobeying the law, they're disrespecting their elders. And so what you had was, even though if people had stopped and looked at what they were asking for, they might have been sympathetic, right?

But no, it was not what they were asking for, it was the civil disobedience, but they saw the lawlessness that caused this backlash. And the field polls shows that over 70% of the electorate opposed the free speech movement. That opens the door for Ronald Reagan to come in and run for governor in 1966, pledging to clean up that mess in Berkeley. So it's very important, beyond just this moment, you think about the impact of the free speech movement. It brought greater freedom to the university, it opened up the political space for the, it would become in the spring of 65, the camp-spaced anti-war movement during the teachings. So it was a boon to the emergence of a kind of expansion of the new left in the anti-war movement, but it also causes backlash that inadvertently that smart politicians like Ronald Reagan and later Jesse Helms would use to empower what was becoming the new right. So it really reshaped a lot of American politics, not just something strange that's happening in California. This is something that's going to be shaping American politics for years to come if you think about Reagan.