Author’s note: A version of this introductory chapter was published in the March/April issue of Illinois Heritage Magazine.
Students carry a demonstrator injured on the first day of protests
at Southern Illinois University on May 6, 1970.
“We are people of this generation, bred in at least moderate comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
— Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society[1]
Newspaper teletype machines made a lot of racket even under normal circumstances, spitting out reports from the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters and other wire services with a cacophonous, metallic clatter. When a dispatch merited immediate attention, a bell would ring; the more important the news, the more times it would ding. John Lopinot was walking past the teletypes on May 4, 1970, at the Daily Egyptian, the newspaper of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, when a sudden change in the breakneck rhythm of the machines caught his attention.
“I remember hearing three dings, three bells, looking down and seeing, ‘Kent State – Four dead,’” said Lopinot, a 19-year-old photographer for the newspaper. “That night, that’s when the fires in the street started downtown, and that’s when people started getting nervous, myself included.”[2]
Ralph Kylloe also was a photographer for the Daily Egyptian in May 1970. The day after the Ohio National Guard opened fire on Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University, he squeezed into a meeting room at the SIU Student Center, where the Student Senate was gathered in emergency session. A standing-room only crowd listened to Student Body President Dwight Campbell call on SIU students to strike in response to the shootings. “We are dealing with a life-and-death situation,” said Campbell, a student power activist from Chicago. “What happened at Kent State could well happen here tomorrow. We are involved in a civil war.”[3]
Kylloe found himself torn between his responsibility as a photojournalist to document events and his emotions as a college student who shared Campbell’s concern about Kent State. “A lot of people were really disgusted with the Establishment,” Kylloe said. “I mean, to shoot and to kill protesters, that was just beyond me.”[4]
Kylloe soon would face more tests of his objectivity, as would his colleagues at the Daily Egyptian, as they reported from one of the battlegrounds of a national student uprising that a presidential commission later would say had brought the nation to the “edge of chaos.”[5] The Carbondale campus was among the nearly 30 percent of U.S. colleges and universities to experience a student strike following the Kent State shootings, and it was among the five percent of institutions where demonstrations turned violent.[6] Protests rocked other Illinois universities in May 1970, and classes at many state institutions were suspended for a week or more.[7] But Carbondale was the first place the Illinois National Guard was dispatched, and it was the last place troops were recalled.[8] SIU was the only Illinois university to be closed by civil disorder when, in the words of Illinois Gov. Richard Ogilivie, state officials decided they could not “keep universities open with a bayonet.”[9]
“It was like a tornado forming”
Trouble did not slip into Carbondale in the middle of the night aboard one of the Illinois Central freight trains that rumbled as regularly as clockwork past the SIU campus. The staff of the Daily Egyptian had watched tensions building for months. Student activists and administrators were polarized, their positions hardened by months of conflict about everything from the Vietnam War to coed study hours in the women’s dorms to the cost of a new residence for the university president.[10] By the spring of 1970, the balance favored confrontation over compromise. An unpopular war provided the fuel; Kent State was the spark; and an underlying tension between native and student populations enflamed passions.
“Not everybody who went out on that march the last night was against the war in Vietnam,” said Jim Hodl, a Daily Egyptian staff member during the May 1970 protests. “They were against the cops; they were against anybody in authority because of what they had gone through. Some of them felt they got a nose full of pepper gas, and they said, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’”[11]
Events quickly turned ugly in Carbondale once news of the Kent State shootings reached campus. On the afternoon of May 6, a rally attended by 3,000 people on the sun-dappled lawn of the university library was followed by the occupation of two campus buildings and the vandalism of offices for the Air Force ROTC program and a center for the study of Vietnamese language and culture. Protesters then marched through Carbondale’s business district before returning to campus to challenge police and security forces.
Well into the evening, police would charge clumps of students, who would disperse and regroup a short distance away, where insults and anything else handy were hurled at the police, inviting another charge from the helmeted, baton-wielding officers. The ragged engagement stopped more than concluded only after both sides were exhausted.[12] By the end of the day, fifty-five students and twenty-eight police officers were treated for mostly minor injuries at local medical facilities, and 650 members of the Illinois National Guard had been activated for duty in Carbondale.[13]
Protesters targeted Carbondale merchants the following night after a volley of pepper gas turned a relatively peaceful sit-in into a riot that covered the compact, seven-block downtown business district in broken glass.[14] Nightly skirmishes between students; city, campus and state police; and National Guard troops continued until the evening of May 12, when an estimated 5,000 demonstrators surrounded the on-campus residence of SIU president Delyte Morris, who vamoosed before the mob arrived.
The university conceded to the protesters shortly after midnight with an announcement that it was closing for the remainder of the spring term.[15] “It was like a tornado forming,” Rich Davis, a Daily Egyptian reporter, said of the post-Kent State turmoil. “You know, there’s this cloud, and it kind of dips down, but you’re not sure if it’s a tornado until it touches the ground, and then it becomes very scary.”[16]
A place not like its surroundings
Police made 543 arrests during the prolonged period of unrest, mostly for violation of a curfew, which was in effect between May 8 and May 12.[17] More than 320 students were charged with breaking either city or state laws; 106 of those were convicted in court.[18] Physical losses were modest. SIU incurred an estimated $25,000 worth of damage; Carbondale businesses had perhaps twice that amount, consisting almost entirely of broken windows.[19]
The cost of extra law enforcement, including the deployment of more than 1,000 National Guard troops to Carbondale, was estimated at $268,000.[20] But perhaps the highest price was paid in the loss of good will between the university and its host community. The feeling of the native population might have been summed up best by Carbondale Mayor David Keene, who watched protesters celebrate the closing of campus on May 12 with an impromptu street party and came to this conclusion: “If these are our children, God help us.”[21]
Carbondale may have been an odd place for insurrection, but it was, in fact, an odd place for one of the country’s largest student populations, whose explosive growth during the 1960s had drawn national attention.[22] Located 335 miles south of Chicago, Carbondale was 100 miles from the nearest urban area, accessible by two-lane highway, private airplane, bus or passenger train.[23] Still, SIU-Carbondale welcomed 23,002 full-time students in the fall of 1970, more than 2½ times its enrollment a decade earlier.[24]
Students outnumbered the resident population of Carbondale, which abutted but did not include the campus.[25] In 1970, in all of Jackson County, where SIU was located, there were more people ages 18-29 than there were aged 30 and older.[26] Demographics and the school’s relative isolation energized a small but committed core of young radicals who were present by the start of the 1969-70 school year. “There was a rawness to the campus, a sense you could do a lot more,” said Bob Carr, a journalism major who transferred to SIU in the fall of 1969 from the University of Illinois. “It was faster; it was more radical. … I think the fact that it was physically removed from Chicago may actually have worked to its advantage in that there was not an immediate connection with home.”[27]
SIU was an anomaly in Southern Illinois, a region that had experienced chronic economic depression for decades.[28] Everywhere but in Jackson County, population had moved away; jobs had disappeared; and poverty had hung stubbornly above state and national averages. More than half of the population – 55.8 percent – in the counties around the SIU campus had no formal education past the eighth grade.[29]
Economic conditions even were worse for the region’s minority population. In Jackson County, where seven percent of the population was African-American, a third of all black families had incomes below the poverty level.[30] The hardscrabble existence gave natives little in common with the idealistic young scholars in their midst, especially during the late 1960s, when more than a quarter of the SIU study body rode passenger trains downstate from Chicago to attend school.[31]
Harry Hix had moved to Carbondale in 1965 from Portales, New Mexico, to pursue graduate studies in journalism. A native of Stillwater, Oklahoma, Hix was struck by the diversity of people and opinions on the Carbondale campus. “My upbringing and experiences were of a much more conservative background than many of the students and people I encountered,” said Hix, who eventually joined the faculty and was managing editor of the Daily Egyptian in May 1970.[32] The clash of cultures worked both ways. Said Kylloe, a Chicago native, “One of the people I hung around with, I went to his house one day, and he had a bunch of guns. And I said, ‘Holy cow!’ That was a little extreme for me. In reality, the guy was a duck hunter.”[33]
Interaction between students and police and students and merchants were points of friction. “Much of Southern Illinois was very provincial,” said Cathy Speegle, a journalism major from Anchorage, Alaska. “There were people in the community who really resented the presence of the university because here were all these kids who were in school – they didn’t have to work a second job or jobs. And I really felt at the time, the police in Carbondale and the (Illinois) state police – you didn’t want to mess with them.”[34]
Jim Hodl recalled that while Carbondale merchants depended upon the student population for their livelihood, some were hostile toward students. He said that group became a target once violence erupted. “The businesses that were roughest on students were the ones who bought the most glass,” he said[35]
How the events of May 6-12, 1970, are remembered is further evidence of the gulf between student and nonstudent perspectives. One published university history dismisses the time in a single paragraph as “the bad old days”;[36] a former student activist puts a positive spin on the same event, calling it “the successful 1970 SIU strike against the war in Vietnam.”[37]
SIU President Delyte Morris had a tradition of greeting new students on the Carbondale campus.
Father knows best
Architect of the university’s dramatic growth was Delyte Morris, who assumed the presidency of SIU in 1948.[38] Morris drove enrollment increases with an open admissions policy and lower tuition than other public universities in Illinois. He parlayed that growth at the Illinois General Assembly into money for programs and buildings.[39] Remembered as the “father of SIU,”[40] Morris personified the philosophy of in loco parentis, which held that universities had a responsibility to act in the place of parents and set limits on students’ personal conduct and freedom of movement.
SIU controlled where students could live, when women had to be in their dormitories at night and who could have automobiles on campus. Dissent was tolerated, but not disruption of academic activity.[41] Morris’s attitude toward protest was reflected in his statement to the press after a group of aggrieved students were forcibly removed from his office in May 1968: “An unruly mob broke into my office. They were driven out by its security officers. Some are in jail, some in the hospital. All are expelled.”[42]
The authoritarian approach was diametrically opposed to the student power movement of the period, which emphasized participatory democracy, direct action and the application of scholarship to real-world problems.[43] Morris, who was 63 when protests closed the Carbondale campus, couldn’t fathom the changes occurring in student culture. He expected students to obey the rules, work within the system and respect the authority of his administration and the board of trustees.[44] He could not accept that young people attending SIU in the 1960s were different than those of the 1950s, when Carbondale students had been described as “fairly tolerant, and they accept without response the political course that others have laid out for them.”[45]
Student dissent had been a spring tradition at SIU since at least 1965, judging from newspaper accounts and a Carbondale protest history, Carbondale After Dark, written by H.P. Koplowitz.[46] Ken Garen, a Daily Egyptian photographer, arrived on campus in 1965. He said the administration’s handling of student grievances over many springs sowed the ground for what sprang up in 1970. “Each year, the students would get frustrated with the controls that were on them and go through these demonstrations, and there would be offers of reform. Then, when they came back in the fall, it was exactly the way it was when they left. Nothing happened.”[47]
Robert MacVicar, chancellor of the Carbondale campus in May 1970, later would say that Morris “simply couldn’t understand. He just had great difficulty understanding why anyone would want to close down an institution that was dedicated to making life better for its students and all of Southern Illinois.”[48] Bob Carr recalled being summoned to the president’s office in the fall of 1969 because of an article he had written for the Daily Egyptian about radical politics on campus. “The interview is a blur,” Carr said. “I don’t recall the specifics of it, but I do remember him calling into question why I would even write such a thing. I remember feeling: This guy just doesn’t get it. He’s from another era, another time.”[49]
A recipe for chaos
The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest concluded that the nationwide protests of May 1970 were powered by three issues: the Vietnam War, racial inequality and the nature of the university itself, which activists saw as supporting the war in Southeast Asia and perpetuating social inequity at home.[50] These themes filtered through largely autonomous groups on individual campuses, where local issues greatly influenced protest.[51] “There was a feeling that it was this big monolithic thing,” said Carr, whose “beat” at the Daily Egyptian in 1969-70 was campus activism. “It wasn’t. It was individuals making daily decisions about where they fell on the spectrum. And it was a huge spectrum.”[52]
Reporters and photographers for the Daily Egyptian recall the leadership of activist groups as small and overlapping, with protests often doubling as social functions. As the 1969-70 academic year progressed, they said, the nature of dissent changed. “You could see the anger in the crowds escalating,” Lopinot said. “The protests were getting louder; there were more people at them.”[53] Reporter Win Holden said students got caught up in what was happening not just in Carbondale but nationwide. “There was this kind of casual approach to it that as events in the country mirrored those that were going on on campus, the level of both anxiety and drama escalated.”[54]
The Vietnam War trumped any campus-specific cause celebre. Ellen Matheson Ramp, a member of the Daily Egyptian’s staff in May 1970, never attended a protest rally before that spring. Still, she said the war was a topic of conversation at her sorority house, especially after a lottery system for the military draft was instituted. The first drawing was held in December 1969 to determine the order in which males aged 19 to 26 would be called for military service in calendar year 1970, when the U.S. armed forces would induct nearly 163,000 young men.[55]
“I can vividly recall sitting around the television set and watching them pull numbers. A boyfriend’s birthdate got matched with a draft number and depending on how high or low that draft number was, he was going to Vietnam,” Ramp said. “It didn’t matter where you were politically. It was where you were personally, knowing people who were being affected by it. Then you had to decide where you were politically.”[56]
A focal point for anti-war sentiment at SIU was the Center for Vietnamese Studies and Programs, which was launched in the summer of 1969 with a $1 million grant from the federal Agency for International Development (AID). The university had provided teacher training in South Vietnam under AID contracts since 1961. Plans for a more formal program of Vietnamese scholarship were developed by the university in the fall of 1968.[57] Besides expanding the teaching program to include the study of Vietnamese literature and culture, the grant foresaw an undefined role for SIU in postwar “economic and social programming” in South Vietnam.[58]
Controversy engulfed the new center after Wesley R. Fishel, formerly of Michigan State University, was hired as a visiting research professor. Fishel had been chief of an MSU advisory group in Vietnam from 1956-1958. A 1966 article in Rampart’s magazine had “outed” Fishel and MSU as being complicit with the CIA in the rise of South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem during the 1950s.[59] Fishel’s and the center’s presence on campus was a magnet for demonstrators in the months preceding the May riots. The center was one of two on-campus symbols of the Vietnam War to be attacked by protesters after Kent State – the other was the on-campus ROTC headquarters — and the study center had been the target of two earlier violent incidents that year.[60]
It wasn’t just radical students who opposed the new program. A committee of the SIU History Department concluded that the center was “not primarily an organization devoted to the scholarly acquisition and dissemination of knowledge concerning Vietnam but has essentially political objectives.”[61] The leading critic on campus was philosophy professor Doug Allen, whose views influenced members of Students for a Democratic Society and the Southern Illinois Peace Committee, the two main activist groups at SIU. “Off AID” became a rallying cry that could not be tamped down by administrators’ proclamations of innocent intent.
“This was a unique program in the country,” recalled Ken Garen. “The speculation was that it was brought to Carbondale because it was felt it was a safe university. There wasn’t much political unrest, and the center could operate out there with little or no repercussions, which ended up not being true.”[62] Bob Carr said activists were convinced the real purpose of the center was to be a front for the CIA in South Vietnam. “Whether all that were true, who knows?” he said. “But the popular feeling that it was a way station to put spooks in South Vietnam was what drove a lot of people to distraction.”[63]
For Delyte Morris, the controversy was evidence of a broader conspiracy against his university. After an “Off AID” conference at SIU in February resulted in a violent clash between demonstrators and security forces, Morris told the Daily Egyptian that the center had become “a national target for student dissidents … bent on trying to destroy it.”[64]
The Air Force ROTC program didn’t draw as much as heat as the Vietnamese center, but it also was a target of protests prior to the May riots. In April, about two dozen protesters entered ROTC offices located in an on-campus academic building “and proceeded to smash windows and displays with rocks, sticks and umbrellas” according to a report by the ROTC unit commander. Two protesters were arrested.[65]
SIU administrators weren’t the only ones concerned about campus protest. The FBI actively monitored student dissent at Illinois colleges and universities, as it did throughout the country. The FBI office in Springfield regularly exchanged information about activists with campus security officers and military intelligence agencies. Special attention was given to members of Students for a Democratic Society, a leading anti-war and student empowerment group. A review of FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows that the FBI kept tabs on at least eight organizations and 26 individuals at SIU between 1968 and the end of 1970.[66]
Student journalists at SIU in May 1970 cite the Vietnamese study center as just one of the persistent irritants, combined with the unimaginable – troops firing on protesters at Kent State – that triggered rioting in Carbondale. When the storm passed, the university would be changed, and Delyte Morris would see his otherwise stellar career come to an ignominious end, shuttled off to retirement by the SIU board of trustees before another school year began.[67]
“I think there was a lot of festering, and I think there also was an element of what we might call grieving. I remember reflecting on these students being shot … and thinking it could have happened on this campus,” said Steve Brown, a Daily Egyptian staffer during the week of unrest. “So, I think there was a rage, a grieving, but certainly an emotionalism that had an accelerant on every other grievance you might have had.”[68]
NEXT: Storms
Endnotes: Chapter 1
[1]Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, accessed 9 August 2004 at http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu. The document was adopted at the SDS national convention in Port Huron, Michigan, in June 1962.
2 John Lopinot, interview by author, by telephone, Carbondale, Illinois, 13 September 2003.
[3] Statement of Dwight Campbell to Student Senate, 5 May 1970, President’s Office Collection, Box 569, General Correspondence folder, Special Collections and Archives, Morris Library, Sou hern Illinois University, Carbondale.
[4] Ralph Kylloe, interview by author, by telephone, Carbondale, Illinois, 30 September, 2002.
[5] “The Report of the Commission on Campus Unrest,” reprinted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 October 1970. President Richard Nixon created the commission in June 1970. It was chaired by William Scranton, former governor of Pennsylvania, and it is sometimes referred to as the Scranton Commission.
[6] Ibid, 75.
[7] For a discussion of protests at other Illinois colleges and universities, see Brian Keith Clardy, “The Management of Dissent: Responses to the Post Kent State Protests at Seven Public Universities in Illinois” (Ph.D. diss., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1999); State of Illinois Joint Committee on Campus Disorders, Report of Findings and Recommendations, 76th General Assembly, 1970; Chicago Tribune, editions of 1 May 1970 through 15 May 1970; Taylor Pensoneau, In the Interest of the State (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1977).
[8] “5,000 Illinois Guardsmen Alerted,” Southern Illinosian, 7 May 1970. (This article notes that of the 5,000 guard troops activated the previous evening, only about 80 were actually dispatched to a campus – SIU at Carbondale.); “Loyola Students to Allow Classes,” Chicago Tribune, 11 May 1970 (This article reports that all Illinois National Guard troops have been released from active duty, “except for 900 still on duty at Carbondale.”)
[9] Pensoneau, op cit., 165.
[10] All editions of the Daily Egyptian forthe 1969-70 school year were reviewed to identify issues that brought students, administrators and community authorities into conflict prior to the May 1970 protests that closed the school.
[11] Jim Hodl, interview by author, by telephone, Carbondale, Illinois, 9 February 2003.
[12] “Police, Students Clash; Several Hurt,” Daily Egyptian, 5 May 1970.
[13] Max Turner, “Chronology of Events Related to the Closing of Southern Illinois University,” C. Thomas Busch Collection, Box 5, Folder 13, Special Collections, Morris Library.
[14] “Police Gas Crowd; Then, Violence,” Daily Egyptian, 8 May 1970. See also, Turner, chronology.
[15] “SIU Closed Indefinitely,” Daily Egyptian, 13 May 1970. See also, Turner, chronology.
[16] Rich Davis, interview by author, in person, Evansville, Indiana, 21 July 2002.
[17] SIU Security Office, n.a., report of arrests made during disturbances at SIU, 6-18 May 1970, by SIU, Carbondale and Illinois State police forces, 6 January 1971, Box 662, Student Dissent folder, President’s Office Collection, Special Collections, Morris Library.
[18] Southern Illinois University, “Wrap-up on Campus Disruptions,” Alumni News 32, No. 9 (April 1971), 3.
[19] Robert G. Layer to Betty Fitzmaurice, personal correspondence, 9 March 1971, Box 662, Student Dissent folder, President’s Office Collection, Special Collections, Morris Library. The letter from Layer, acting chancellor of SIU-C, to Fitzmaurice, a student at Joliet Junior College, noted that previously reported estimates of damages were “exaggerated.”
[20] Zelah Scalf, “Extra Police Bills Total $286,000,” Southern Illinoisan, 27 May 1970.
[21] “Carbondale, Edwardsville SIU Turmoil,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, 14 May 1970.
[22] For articles about the growth of Southern Illinois University, see Lucia Mouat, “Mild Educator Molds Big Midwest Campuses,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 July 1968, and George Leposky, “Education Explosion in Southern Illinois,” Chicago American, 25 November 1968.
[23] U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1970, Vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population, Part 15, Illinois – Section 1 (U.S Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1973). The closest urban area to Carbondale in 1970 was Evansville, Indiana, located 101 miles to the east. The closest urban center in Illinois was the East St. Louis-St. Louis area, 103 miles west of Carbondale.
[24] Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, registrar’s report, Fall, 1976,1,Table 1.
[25] Census, 1970, Table 28. Population of 22,816 given for Carbondale, which would have included some students residing in off-campus housing.
[26] Ibid, Table 35.
[27] Bob Carr, interview by author, by telephone, Carbondale, Illinois, 17 September 2002.
[28] Greater Egypt Regional Planning and Development Commission, Franklin, Jackson, Jefferson, Perry and Williamson counties, Illinois, Initial Overall Economic Development Program Report, May 1967, B-16.
[29] Ibid, C1-8.
[30] Op cit., Census, 1970, Table 27.
[31] “Students from North increase,” the Daily Egyptian, 19 February 1970. Enrollment figures given for both SIU-Carbondale and the smaller Edwardsville, Illinois, campus. Edwardsville’s enrollment in fall quarter of 1969 was 12,152, compared to 23,002 for Carbondale.
[32] Harry Hix, interview by author, by telephone, Carbondale, Illinois, 20 September 2002.
[33] Kylloe, interview.
[34] Cathy Speegle, interview by author, by telephone, Carbondale, Illinois, September 2002.
[35] Hodl, interview.
[36] Betty Mitchell, Southern Illinois University, A Pictorial History, (G. Bradley Publishing, Inc.: St. Louis, Mo., 1993)
[37] Ray Lenzi to author Robbie Lieberman in Prairie Power, Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2004) (p. 176), .
[38] Karen Blatter, “His Legacy Lives On,” Daily Egyptian, Delyte Morris 50-year Commemorative Edition, 16 October 1998.
[39] Robert A. Harper, The University that Shouldn’t Have Happened, but Did (Carbondale: Devil’s Kitchen Press, 1998), 249.
[40] Op cit., Blatter.
[41] Dean of Students Wilbur Moulton to Chancellor Robert MacVicar, Interim Police on Campus Disorders, Sept. 25, 1968, Box 637, Crisis Management Committee folder, President’s Office Collections, Special Collections, Morris Library.
[42] Statement of SIU president Delyte Morris, 8 May 1968, Box 453, Student Disturbances folder, President’s Office Collection, Special Collections, Morris Library.
[43] For a discussion of the student activism at non-elite public universities in the 1960s, see Robbie Lieberman, Prairie Power, (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press: 2004) and Kenneth J. Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era, (New York and London: New York University Press, 1993). For a discussion of New Left politics and campus dissent, see John McMillen “You Didn’t Have to be There: Revisiting the New Left Consensus” in The New Left Revisited, (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003); Andrew Hunt, “How New Was the New Left,” in The New Left Revisited; Francessca Polletta, “Strategy and Democracy in the New Left,” in The New Left Revisited; Wini Breines, “Of This Generation: The New Left and the Student Movement,” in Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
[44]“Mild educator molds big Midwest campuses,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 July 1968.
[45]George Kimball Plochman, The Ordeal of Southern Illinois, (Carbondale, Southern Illinois Press, 1957), 578.
[46] H.B. Koplowitz, Carbondale After Dark, (Carbondale: DOME publications).
[47] Ken Garen, interview by author, by telephone, 17 September 2002, Carbondale, Illinois.
[48] “At first popular, Morris later lost students’ favor,” the Daily Egyptian, Oct. 16, 1998, Morris special edition, 3.
[49] Carr, interview.
[50] Scranton Commission, The Chronicle on Higher Education.
[51] Kenneth J. Heineman was one of the first historians to examine in detail the anti-war movement and student dissent at non-elite state universities. He found that students’ tactics and perceptions of American societies reflected their immediate environment. The type of relationship groups had with university administrators and other students determined the method of dissent and the evolution of confrontation. See Heineman, Campus Wars, (p.125). Francesca Polletta, writing in The New Left Revisited, suggests that a centralized, bureaucratic structure was antithetical to the core values of the 1960s student activists. See Polletta, “Strategy and Democracy in the New Left,” The New Left Revisited, (p.157). Robbie Lieberman and David Cochran state the historiography of the student movement supports the idea that there is no dominant narrative; “what the local stories tell us is that the supposed anomalies are (emphasis by author) the story.” See Lieberman and Cochran, “ ‘It Seemed a Very Local Affair’: the Student Movement at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale,” in The New Left Revisited, (p. 23). Also, Lieberman, writing in Prairie Power, states that oral histories of former student activists at non-elite, Midwestern state universities, do not express a clear ideology. Rather, the campus activists of the late 1960s were closer to the Midwest populist tradition and favored the direct-action approach of the old Industrial Workers of the World rather than a particular intellectual tradition. See Lieberman, Prairie Power, (p. 6).
[52] Carr, interview.
[53] John Lopinot, interview by author, by telephone, 18 September 2002, Carbondale, Illinois
[54] Win Holden, interview by author, by telephone, 2 May 2003, Carbondale, Illinois.
[55] Induction statistics from U.S. Selective System website, http:\\www.sss.gov, accessed 24 April 2019.
[56] Ellen Matheson Ramp, interview by author, by telephone, 20 May 2004, Bloomington, Indiana.
[57] Letter to Sen. J.W. Fullbright from John S. Hannah, administrator, Agency for International Development, 9 September 1969, Thomas Busch Collection, Box 5, Folder 8, Special Collections, Morris Library.
[58] Busch Collection, Box 5, Grant Application, Special Collections, Morris Library
[59] Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer and Sol Stern, “The University on the Make,” Ramparts, April 1966, accessed 25 May 2019, https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357L/357LMSUinVietnam.pdf.
[60]“Police, students clash at Woody Hall,” 31 January 1970, Daily Egyptian; “Weekend results: peaceful march, $15,000 damage,” 24 February 1970, Daily Egyptian.
[61] “History committee says Viet Center academic threat,” Daily Egyptian, 20 February 1970.
[62] Garen, interview by author.
[63] Carr, interview by author.
[64] “Weekend results: peaceful march, $15,000 damage,” 24 February 1970, Daily Egyptian.
[65] “Student agitation,” Southern Illinois University, author unknown, FBI letterhead memo, Freedom of Information Act request No. 0991941.
[66] Based on review of approximately 1,100 pages of FBI memoranda obtained via FOIA request No. 0991941, U.S. Department of Justice, by the author for documents concerning the monitoring of student dissent on Illinois college campuses from spring 1968 through calendar year 1970.
[67] For a discussion of Delyte Morris’s relationship with the SIU Board of Trustees in 1969-1970, see Harper, The University that Shouldn’t Have Happened, but Did, (pp. 263-300); “Stone House scandal brings Morris’ tenure to a close,” Daily Egyptian, Morris commemorative issue, 16 October 1998. See also, SIU board of trustees minutes for 19 June 1970, when the board accepted Morris’s proposal to relinquish day-to-day responsibilities as SIU president and assume the title of president emeritus on Sept. 1, 1970, Special Collections, Morris Library.
[68] Steve Brown, interview by author, in person, 27 February 2003, Carbondale, Illinois.
The edge of chaos 