John Wolf and Heiner Giese
When the Oct. 18, 1967, anti-war protest against Dow Chemical at UW-Madison turned violent, it became a “transformative day” for many.
Before he begins to speak, Ken Smith’s eyes fill with tears.
“It was such a transformative day for me that I can’t talk about it without a lot of emotion,” he says. “It was the day I went from passive to active.”
Smith was a 19-year-old freshman at UW-Madison on Oct. 18, 1967, when student activists blocked access to the Commerce Building (now Ingraham Hall), where the Dow Chemical Company — which made the incendiary weapon napalm — was holding a recruitment event. Smith opposed the war and agreed with the activists, but he thought their direct action tactics were “misguided.” Still, he went to the demonstration and observed from across the street. “I heard screaming, and I knew something was pretty bad,” he says. Then he saw people being hauled out of the building, many covered in blood. “Police weren’t arresting people for sitting in — they were beating the shit out of them.”
From his perch on top of a planter outside the Social Sciences building, Smith recalls seeing a bleeding demonstrator collapse onto the pavement below. When a group of police officers followed and began “systematically clubbing” the man, Smith knew he had to act. He jumped into the fray and knocked the officers down, then escaped into the crowd. “I couldn’t stand for this anymore,” he remembers thinking. He says the moment transformed him into a “complete revolutionary” — in November 1968, when Richard Nixon was elected president, he left school, dodged the draft and “disappeared into the underground” for several years before returning to UW-Madison to finish his degree.
Smith shared his memories last week on the 50th anniversary of the Dow Chemical protest as part of an oral history recording project. A partnership between UW-Madison and Madison Public Library, the two-day session drew nearly a dozen Madisonians who provided first-hand accounts of the protest and how it shaped their lives. “It was a really important time on our campus,” says Troy Reeves, head of the university’s oral history program at the UW-Madison archives. “And these people are all at an age when they are prime to reflect.”
Madison native Mary Farmiloe was walking back from a class in Van Vleck when she saw people gathering near the Carillon tower. “All of a sudden, all hell broke loose,” she recalls. “People started rushing out of Commerce and running. And then there was gas.” A 17-year-old freshman at the time, she started running but got tangled in the crowd. When she fell, someone picked her up and carried her all the way around Bascom Hall, dropping her safely at the foot of the Abraham Lincoln statue. “Later on, it made me really angry,” she says of the violence. “This isn’t how we behaved in my hometown.”
For many who shared stories, the day was transformative. John Schooley was a 19-year-old Naval ROTC member and fraternity brother at the time, and he says he was “relatively conservative” before the Dow demonstration. But what he saw that day challenged his beliefs. “It really began a process of me questioning what was going on,” he says. “Not only with Vietnam, but especially with what was going on and the way things were being reported.… It was very disillusioning.”
By the next fall, Schooley had dropped out of ROTC and left his fraternity. He became a conscientious objector and served two years of alternative duties providing medical care, which pushed him toward a career as a physician’s assistant. He spent almost his entire career working in the Department of Veterans Affairs. “This was the event that changed me. I recognized that as time went on that year,” he says. “The date has always stuck in my mind.”
Oct. 18, 1967: Dow demonstration kicks off series of anti-war protests at UW-Madison. It’s the first anti-war protest at a major U.S. college campus to turn violent and the first time tear gas is used on an anti-war demonstration.
Demonstrators inside the building: 200-250
Crowd outside: 2,000-5,000
Number of police: 150
Number of students hurt: Dozens
Number of police officers hurt: 19
Aug. 24, 1970: Four protesters bomb Sterling Hall, home of Army Math research center, killing postdoctoral fellow Robert Fassnacht.
