The Mood in San Francisco
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
NATIONAL REPORTS The Mood in San Francisco San Francisco By Steven V. Roberts A group of pacifists recently marched up from Carmel and staged an all-night vigil in front of City Hall, demanding...
...When Alameda County officials talk about the Oakland Seven in private they start sputtering words like "sedition" and "treason," not "trespass...
...Police are now regularly called to put down fracases at local high schools (there was a particularly bad one over a basketball game between white and black schools) and even junior highs...
...Chancellor Roger Heyns at Berkeley and Acting President S. I. Hayakawa at San Francisco State have not hesitated to use force against students, and each clash gets a little more violent—on both sides...
...The scene was joyous and peaceful—and very out of place...
...And they have persistently hunted down Cleaver and his fellow Black Panthers...
...But a few tentative explanations are possible...
...They find a new purpose and feeling of community merely by participating...
...In Mexico City, students were machine-gunned in the streets, and they started shooting back...
...Across the Bay in Oakland, seven young men are being tried for conspiracy to trespass and obstruct policemen, felony charges that could result in three-year jail sentences...
...The city is on a "bummer"—a bad trip...
...At the Presidio, the mutinous soldiers were tried for the crime of staging a peaceful sit-down demonstration and asking the base commandant to listen to a list of grievances they had prepared...
...Like the Alameda County officials, the Army brass seems eager to set an example of harsh reprisal and deter further dissent...
...As for ego gratification, getting beaten up by a cop is an uncomfortable, yet incontrovertible, way of proving not only that you exist but that you matter...
...It seemed more like an old newsreel clip than a contemporary political event, a film that evoked considerable nostalgia for a time pleasantly remembered but definitely over...
...NATIONAL REPORTS The Mood in San Francisco San Francisco By Steven V. Roberts A group of pacifists recently marched up from Carmel and staged an all-night vigil in front of City Hall, demanding clemency for 27 soldiers charged with mutiny in the stockade of the Presidio, the Army base overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge...
...Among white students, the move toward active resistance was motivated mainly by the feeling that they could not influence Vietnam policy through peaceful protest...
...In addition, young people of all races have become entranced, even intoxicated, with the rhetoric of revolution...
...The next day, shots were fired into several other campus buildings...
...People just want to clamp down," one Democratic politician commented...
...In the case of the black students, many who are now pouring onto college campuses were recruited from the ghettos and are used to a much more aggressive and physically violent style of expressing themselves than the average white, or middle-class black, collegian...
...The emotional content of the movement is terribly important, therefore, and "revolution" is a first-rate high...
...For many young people, radical protest is an end in itself...
...These incidents follow a long series of bombings at induction centers and similar establishments...
...The suit was clearly brought against the Oakland Seven to intimidate future political protests, since the state conspiracy laws are very vague and could probably apply to almost anyone who helps organize a demonstration...
...As one student said, "Berkeley thought it was getting 300 Roy Wilkinses, but it wound up with 300 Eldridge Cleavers...
...the larger and more distant goals of social change often recede into the background...
...The repressive actions of the "power structure," civil and military, have accelerated rapidly...
...It appears locked in an increasingly vicious cycle of violence and counter-violence, and the end all remains very unclear...
...Some students in the Bay area carry more rocks and stink bombs to class than books...
...Agenda for the Democrats...
...Laws to restrict the student demonstrators stand a good chance of passage in the legislature, which also holds the enormous power of the purse over the state college system...
...There is a lot of talk about guns among the radicals, and some have bought them and are taking lessons...
...Many liberals who have been deeply sympathetic to student demands for university reform and an end to the war are now cringing at the violent tactics used at Berkeley and State...
...They are seriously worried that the integrity of the institutions and their essential commitment to rationality are being threatened...
...Moreover, they are challenging something very dear to a generation nurtured on the patriotic formula of World War II-faith in the country...
...Before the first of the 27 was sentenced, the prosecutor urged the court-martial not to stress the seriousness of the actual offense...
...The roots of this mood in San Francisco are jumbled and obscure...
...Their candles flickered and danced in the cool evening air, and snatches of the old movement songs floated up from small knots of people clustered around strumming guitars...
...The blacks, and their allies in the Third World movement, are bent on demonstrating their power, sometimes merely for the sake of showing that they have it...
...Stop the Draft Week, for instance, represented a definite intensification of student tactics...
...Meanwhile, Governor Ronald Reagan is taking every available opportunity to denounce radicals at San Francisco State College and Berkeley, and his rating in the public opinion polls is soaring...
...It is largely talk, but occasionally it provokes an eruption...
...Compromise" has become an obscenity...
...The young radicals, of course, are hardly innocent...
...They know it's insane to go out with a gun and snipe at the cops, but right now guns represent an extension of the concept of self-defense, which started with Stop the Draft Week...
...Why else would the cop have bothered to hit you...
...On the Establishment side, the growing repression obviously springs from the same climate in the country that spawned the "law and order" campaign appeals of Richard Nixon and George Wallace...
...When Tom Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (sds) spoke recently at a birthday party for Huey Newton, the Black Panther leader now in jail for shooting an Oakland policeman, he made an impassioned appeal for revolutionary struggle...
...That's history...
...But churning in its streets today is an ugly mood, a mood of bitterness and violence that chills the first warmth of spring...
...The opposition to the militant and intractable young radicals, though, is not confined to Reagan-ites and other troglodytes...
...It is the attack on the system that counts," he said-and less than an hour later a sentence of 14 years at hard labor was returned...
...In the past, demonstrators have usually been charged with misdemeanors, which seldom carry sentences longer than 90 days...
...To emphasize his point, he left the stage and returned brandishing a rifle...
...Reagan has proclaimed an emergency at Berkeley and moved National Guardsmen to the campus...
...The peacemakers are now the villains, vilified by extremists on both sides eager for conflict...
...Thus they started moving "from dissent to resistance," and they have traveled very swiftly along that road in the last 17 months...
...They imbibe it like older generations slurped beer...
...They have been dominated by whites for so long," one college administrator said, "that they just want to show they have some control over their own lives...
...Steven V. Roberts, a frequent contributor to these pages, was recently appointed Los Angeles bureau chief of the New York Times...
...And continuing turmoil, they fear, will only produce a ferocious counterattack that could destroy the universities...
...What is certain, however, is that between the young radicals and the Establishment the lines are hardening, the rhetoric and the action escalating...
...The charges stem from their activities during Stop the Draft Week, a major series of antiwar demonstrations in the Bay area in October 1967...
...Sometimes one gets the impression that the movement is like a kid who started on fairly mild drugs, then looked for something more powerful when they lost their kick...
...Instead of empty cans on their mantelpieces, they tack up posters of Che Guevara—whom they conveniently forget was a rather unsuccessful guerrilla...
...A 19-year-old State student lies blinded and crippled in a local hospital because a bomb he was planting in the Creative Arts Building exploded prematurely...
...Obviously the situation is very different here, but when it's necessary to launch an attack, that will happen...
...This year, acts of violence and vandalism, mainly on college campuses, have risen sharply...
...Among their demands was the investigation of the killing of a fellow prisoner, more psychiatric help for inmates, and improvement of medieval conditions one lawyer has called "worse than our soldiers experienced in Japanese prison camps...
...San Francisco is still beautiful and vibrant, a rare place which pulses with the juices of urban life at its best, and yet avoids many irritants endemic to the big city...
...Indeed, the prosecution is basing its case on the fact that the defendants performed such insurrectionary acts as renting buses and opening bank accounts...
...San Francisco is well beyond the days of "We Shall Overcome," and even those of flower children and love-ins in Golden Gate Park...
...A stream of witnesses has testified that they participated in the demonstrations because they felt "there was nothing else to do...
...Apparently because the young people are defying not just the politics but the essential values and life styles of an older generation...
...Instead of merely protesting the injustice of the draft, the demonstrators actually tried to block the entrance to the Oakland induction center...
...This has come out clearly during the Oakland Seven trial...
...Recently Alameda County officials also brought conspiracy charges against three more radicals for participating in protests last fall in support of Eldridge Cleaver's lectures at the University of California in Berkeley...
...One member of the Oakland Seven explained: "People are losing their fear of violence...
Vol. 52 • March 1969 • No. 5
