iii
The March Downtown
The major political event of 1972 at Busiris was Melvin Laird's address on Wednesday, October 25 to the monthly meeting of the Riverton Downtown Businessmen's Association at the Hilton Hotel. The speech, everyone knew, was part of Richard Nixon's reelection campaign, intended to generate support for war policies in national disrepute everywhere except in the rural Midwest and South. Busiris, which had once awarded Nixon an honorary degree, was one of a handful of American campuses on which a Nixon man could safely have set foot that year. Balanced between a great Democratic machine upstate and a concentration of Republicans downstate, Illinois was considered crucial to the President's cause. An invitation was solicited, and not two weeks before the election the Secretary of Defense was dispatched to downstate Illinois to remind voters that their Republican president needed their help in keeping America and the world safe for General Motors.
What remained of the Busiris radical white left, humiliated by the S. D. S. assassinations, saw Laird's visit as something the whole wide world would be watching, and a chance to put Tech in the New York Times. Field House construction two years earlier had been largely the domain of the Black Students Alliance, which had politely but firmly rejected white offers of direct assistance. And frustrated whites, having read their Stokely Carmichael, kept their distance, knowing that while other colleges had canceled classes and even graduations, booted R. O. T. C. off campus, burned buildings, and even provoked police into beating and shooting students, Busiris had in the sixties done nothing worthy of national attention. With the radical moment waning and the war an all but settled issue, Laird's visit looked like one last chance for the white left to assert itself.
So confrontation was from the beginning the order of the day—confrontation and maximum publicity. Less than a week after the Riverton Standard-Republican broke the news of Laird’s visit, a group calling itself Students for an Impartial Hearing on the Vietnam War announced plans for a day-long teach-in at the Odeon Theater, directly across the street from the Hilton. Their announcement brought little reaction in either state or local newspapers, until the city moved to block their rental of the theater on the specious grounds that Students for an Impartial Hearing was an ad hoc group without demonstrated ability to guarantee the behavior of participants in the teach-in and financially unable to post bond against a potential riot. Radio, television, and newspapers covered the especially ugly confrontation between city officials and radical students at a city council meeting.
And the students had their publicity, if not their teach-in.
Then the Black Students Alliance, partially at Charles' request and partially to flex its own muscle, stepped in on the side of the anti-war radicals. Billy Jo Allen proclaimed (incorrectly) that since most of the deaths in Vietnam were black deaths, and since Laird and the whole Nixon crew was a bunch of “racist pigs,” the struggle against the war was a black struggle even more than a white struggle. He called upon Busiris faculty, students, and administrators to support the teach-in publicly and financially. He did this merely to tweak Busiris, knowing that several Tech trustees were prominent members of the Businessmen’s Association, which had invited Laird in the first place. Allen offered the Alliance to front for the whites in renting the theater.
Knowing students would receive no support from their college, City Manager William Wright offered to allow Busiris, or a registered student club like the Alliance, to rent the Odeon on the condition that Busiris accept full legal and financial responsibility for “damage to persons, property or the civil peace resulting directly or indirectly from student-sponsored activities.” In effect City Council was throwing the matter back into the hands of University administrators, which was where they felt the problem belonged anyway. As expected—or conspired—Old Main refused to support its students. With the situation at an impasse, a meeting was held off campus . . . in the apartment Jack and Rose Marié were renting on Harrison Street.
At the time, Rose Marié was in New York with Timm, visiting her folks prior to giving birth to Jennifer Lynn. Had she been in Riverton, she would have forbidden the meeting, at least at her apartment, for Rose Marié disapproved generally of Jack’s radical politics and she most certainly disapproved of drugs, which circulated freely throughout the night. Wherever the meeting had been held, however, events would probably have fallen as they did. And we were safer at Jack’s place than in the Alliance office, which was later revealed to have been bugged by campus security.
Concerned for my own future, Linda encouraged me to stay home and read a book. But I too was fascinated by Jack and caught up again in the romance of protest. I promised, unfaithfully, to avoid the dope and keep my mouth shut, then scurried out the back door.
The group was small, maybe twenty-five people, and racially mixed. In contrast to my experience in California, where whites and blacks collected in mutually suspicious cliques, these people seemed fully integrated and rather comfortable with each other: students and teachers, whites and blacks. I noted what I took to be three inter-racial couples and a collage of long hair, beards, Afros, jeans, sandals, miniskirts, diaphanous garments of various fabrics and designs. Seasoning everything was the sweet scent of pot, and the music of Sly and the Family Stone. A beautiful white girl, one of those mad, lost angels who had inquired after Charles during registration, sat perched on the arm of the sofa beside him, her blue-and-green paisley mini revealing a white V of panties where her crossed legs met, silent most of the evening, brushing his arm occasionally with her knee.
“Every situation,” Jack was explaining when I arrived, “offers some possibilities that are pretty much a certainty to anyone who plays his cards right. There are usually further possibilities if you’re lucky, but you don’t count on them. Gravy if you get them, no loss if you don’t.
“And every situation precludes some things. You might want them, but you’re never gonna get them, so you don’t even think about them. If you try for more than a situation allows, you just fuck yourself up.
“The trick is to let your opponent think you’re playing for some big damned trophy you know you’re not going to get, while you secretly play for that which is within reach. This way, your opponent gets overconfident. This way, you know something he doesn’t. The thing is to not fool yourself while you’re fooling him. Getting caught up in your own act can fuck you up as much as playing for more than a situation offers.”
“We’re not going to end the war,” one of the students admitted.
“Not in Riverton, Illinois” everyone agreed.
“We won’t get fair publicity.”
“Not in the Standard-Republican.”
“We won’t change Laird’s mind, or Nixon’s. Or even Stoddard’s.”
“Check.”
“So what are we playing for? What can we reasonably hope to accomplish?”
It was Billy Jo Allen who finally suggested that the highest attainable goal was creating a confrontation with the police which might cost Nixon enough votes to lose Illinois and, possibly, a close election.
Jack agreed. The group began formulating a strategy.
“The city will tangle you up as long as possible with talk and technicalities. They’ll use words to confuse you,” he warned, “preventing you from formulating firm plans for a teach-in or a demonstration until it's too late to publicize your protest. Any large action will then collapse under the weight of an impossible time frame. A small group of protesters can be dealt with quietly as individuals, not as a group. Like the S. D. S. kids. The Man always deals more severely with individuals than with an organized group, because one alone is powerless.”
“You're suggesting we forget the teach-in?” asked a tall, bearded, white male.
“I'm suggesting that words are just bullshit. Have no reverence for the Word. Recognize the talk about permits and licenses for the bullshit it is, and plan something which doesn't involve permits, licenses or rentals. Focus on creating a confrontation, not a teach-in.”
“We could close Busiris until they agree to rent the Odeon,” Allen suggested. “We can close this school any day we want to. There’s a confrontation.”
Ben Allan Browne frowned. “Close Busiris and you change the issue. Not the people vs. the War, but Busiris Technical University vs. its own students. Do you want to change the issue from Vietnam to education?”
“A good enough issue for sure.”
“The real issue,” Jack argued, “is control. Who controls what you do? You? The government? The army, the police, city officials, university administrators, teachers? Their goal is to run your life, and petitioning only legitimatizes their authority. Of course they'd prefer not to be embarrassed, as a strict parent doesn't want to be embarrassed in church by a fidgety kid. But they'll tolerate a little embarrassment as long as they're still in control—of the country, the war, the school, your life. Playing games over rentals and permits is just requesting permission to be a little bad. It leaves them in control. Acting out of control is one possibility this situation offers.”
“So what can we do?”
“Seem like there be no permit, then there be no demonstration. Or there be a whole lot of people in jail.”
“On what charge?”
“Criminal trespass. Parading without a license.”
“Does that stay on your record? Can that get you blackballed from a job?”
“Wait a minute, candy-ass” Jack interrupted. “You're already running scared, and if they got you scared, they got you.
“Billy Jo, you remember the Field House thing? And that vote on Afro-American literature last year? You remember how those yahoos caved in when they saw you people packing the hallway? Gave you everything you wanted. You remember that?
“So how'd that come about?” Jack asked rhetorically. “What brought those rednecks around? Why did Boss Stoddard back you against downtown?”
“Ah dunno, Boss Creed,” Billy Jo answered in a mock Southern drawl. “Ya’all tell me why white folks bes so strange.”
Laughter.
Creed played to Allen. “He aftah yo money, boy. The Man may hate yo guts, but he love yo money.”
“I done knowd it wasn’t on account of he so enjoyed two days of our company.”
More laughter.
“No, sir,” Jack concluded. “The Alliance did not get Afro-American Studies because the Busiris Board of Directors believes in Mr. Spade.”
Some blacks shifted uneasily. Neither Billy Jo nor Charles batted an eye.
“Jack’s right,” Lou Feracca said. “This school will not let 100 students get their heads busted or jailed or anything else that will send them or their brothers and sisters flocking over to Bradley or up to Chicago Circle or Roosevelt or De Paul.”
“What this school fears more than anything is a Big Damn Mess,” Jack pointed out. “Something in all the newspapers that will make them look bad. Something that will cost them students.”
“$3,200 times 100 makes $320,000,” Ben Allen pointed out. “Times every year you stay at Busiris. A lot of cash. Collectively you are all free, white, and 21.”
“Right on.”
“Just make sure there's 100 of you,” Charles warned, “because five or ten, they will fire your ass right on out of here, same as they did to those S. D. S. kids. A Little Damn Mess, happening quietly in a corner—shit, a little damn mess is no mess at all. But 100 together, they ain't gonna touch you. Black, white, or green. I can promise you that. Your chains are buried at the bottom of the ocean.”
“And the city will not touch you either,” Ben Allen added, “because on this issue the city will do what the college tells it to do.”
“One other thing,” Jack reminded the group. “To end with 100, you start with 500. That’s the way things work on this campus.”
The students had all heard many times, in class and out, Jack’s doctrine of being by doing. “You make yourself free by acting as if you are free.” Perhaps their youth inclined them naturally toward action rather than analysis. Perhaps their lives were more focused, less fragmented by cross-purposes. Perhaps they genuinely believed. After all, it was their future even more than ours. I understood why Jack spent his time with them rather than with his colleagues.
I alone resisted. “I have not been at Busiris as long as any of you, so maybe I’m wrong. But in the year I’ve been on this campus I have not seen 500 people ready to put their careers on the line for a principle. Willing to confront not only Melvin Laird, but a platoon of Riverton cops. Not to mention a whole division of Riverton rednecks.”
“We can count on Kramer and Cutter for sure,” Lou Feracca joked.
“Charles could enlist Victoria Nation,” said Ben Allan Browne.
Jack nodded thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think there are 500 people. Not a hundred at Busiris willing to put their balls on the line and march. Maybe fifty, and most of them are students. We could list the names. And that list would not include liberals like Ted Jones. Or [this with a sharp look at Ben Allan] Victoria Nation.”
“Marcus and Aaron are gone too,” Browne noted.
“We’re an endangered species,” Lou Feracca lamented.
“Say fifty,” Jack meditated aloud. “Add to them maybe a hundred like Mr. Jones, who was snipped years ago but has a vague recollection and even an occasional urge. In the presence of fifty with balls, that hundred might discover a remembered courage of their own, and you have 150.
“Then there are the sheep. The rich kids guilty about their comfortable lives. Psych and soc majors full of pity for the world’s victims, unanalytical, but eager to support the cause of the day.”
“Easy tools to swell a progress.”
“Not very smart, but they have good hearts. They’ll march with us, partly as a lark, partly to be where it’s happening, partly to save victims of social injustice.”
“They also serve who meekly follow.”
“They’re useful today,” Charles reflected. “Tomorrow? They scare the shit out of me. Stupid people are dangerous people. By the tens and hundreds of thousands they take degrees and off they go to right the world’s wrongs. Finding little work in this field, they set about manufacturing more. I’ve seen this happening already out East: Do-Gooders Militant. Solutions in Search of Problems. ‘Could it be that you too have a problem we can help you solve? Think hard. No injustice is too small! We’d like to help you learn to help yourself.’ If colleges were smart, they would exterminate all programs in psychology, sociology, and social work before the hurricane begins.
“Anyway, they’re useful today. Use ‘em before they smother you, I always say. Hell yes, I think we can get 500 to march downtown.”
So we decided (I was a part of this too) to let administration think they had snookered us, and to decoy city officials and the police by substituting a teach-in on the University campus for the Odeon event. Student leaders would speak, and probably the Lutheran minister from the campus religious center. Marcus DeLotta and Aaron Finkelstein might be induced to make a return visit to Riverton. What had they further to lose? Jack would speak last. If 500 or more people remained at the end of his speech, figuring 1 in 3 would join a march, plants in the rear of the crowd would agitate for a march to the Hilton. Other plants would support the idea and begin movement down Washington Avenue. If fewer than 150 marchers passed Brady’s Bonanza, the non-leaders would disappear into stores and side streets and the non-march would evaporate. Movement in the direction of the Hilton would begin 45 minutes before Laird's speech, so that demonstrators would greet him at the hotel. This plan would have the additional advantage of splitting police between protesters and Laird supporters, evening up the sides until Secretary and students came together. Once students and Secretary met at the Hilton, events could unfold as they unfolded, although Jack cautioned that damage to the hotel could upset the delicate balance between the love of $3,200 per student per year in tuition and fees, and the traditional hatred of students pitched in the hearts of most politicians, police, teachers, and college administrators.
The evening’s business concluded, most of the blacks left, and with them most of the politics. Charles put a Doors album on the record machine, then settled into the sofa with a glass of white wine. The girl in the mini-dress slipped down beside him. One of the males rolled two joints, lit one, and passed it to his left.
“The head, man, the head,” inquired another.
“Hallway, left,” Charles indicated.
A lanky brunette crossed the living room on her way to the refrigerator, detouring slightly in the direction of a male she’d been eying all night. Her nipples stood erect under a tie-dyed T-shirt, and she gave him a flip of the hip as she passed. His eyes followed her briefly. Returning with a bottle of beer, she dropped to the floor beside him, her long legs stretched in my direction. With his right index finger, he traced a question mark on her thigh.
“Terri.” Her finger traced another question mark on his jeans.
“Tony.”
She nodded. His finger returned to her thigh: a question mark and then an arrow, pointing up her leg.
“Sure.”
They rose together.
“Hallway to the right,” Charles told them. “Don’t mess the sheets.”
“The time to hesitate is through,” chanted Jim Morrison. “No time to wallow in the mire.”
Lou raised his beer. “To our foe, the Secretary of Defense.”
Ben Allan raised his glass. “To President Stoddard, the wise man who invited him.”
One of the students raised his joint. “To all who are with us.”
“To Victoria Nation and Ted Jones and Percy Thompson who are not with us.”
“Who you?” a brunette in a pageboy asked me.
“This is Andy Tucker,” Jack said.
“Jack’s office partner.”
“Must be fun, sharing an office with him.”
“Salvation in a wicked world,” said Jack. “Andy keeps me sane.” His right arm reached around the waist of his young friend, who kissed him lightly on the cheek.
“To good colleagues and good students,” Jack offered. “Help those who deserve help, and kick the bastards in the balls.”
“I’m for good teachers and good students,” said my brunette. “And for good student-teacher relationships. My name’s Jodi McKinstry, but my friends call me Jodi Mac. Your name is Andy.”
“Well . . . yes. And so it is.”
“I’m a Bucks Belle,” Jodi informed me.
“A Bucks Belle?”
“A Buck Fuck.” Jodi laughed—not stupidly or nervously, a laugh like Jack’s, vaguely wicked, but healthy and full of life. “You never heard of us?”
“I’ve only been here a year.”
“Officially we’re Bucks Belles, but we just call ourselves Buck Fucks. It’s a full scholarship, including room and board. Our job is to help recruit athletes for Busiris. You know, when these high school boys come to campus for a visit, show them a good time. Most colleges have something like us, but we’re better than the girls at other colleges. Which is why Busiris gets better players.” She laughed again.
“Three of us are white, and three of us are black. We don’t mix colors, unless we really want to. I don’t mix colors anyway. You honest Injun never heard of the Bucks Belles?”
“A full scholarship?”
“It’s a pretty easy job, really. I recruit baseball and basketball only. Other sports are on their own. Good thing this school doesn’t have a football program.
“My responsibility ends the minute a guy signs a letter of intent. So I’m busy only during recruiting season, when they come for campus visits. Except there was this one guy last year, he fell in love with me, you know, right on his first visit. Kept writing me and calling me all summer. Well, he was kind of cute, a little dumb, and I went out with him a few times in the fall. Then I had to break it off because of my other commitments. He found a new girl friend. Cute jocks have no trouble at this school.”
I nodded sympathetically.
“Sometimes we do it for fun, and sometimes for money. That’s what Professor Creed says. That way we’re happy and rich both. That’s how I look at things.”
I nodded again.
Jodi Mac turned serious. “I’m quite good at what I do, Andy.” She had brown Bambi eyes.
“And you’re very lovely,” I answered quietly.
My rejection obviously hurt Jodi Mac.
“I’m not, you know, some kind of dumb whore. I’ve got a 3.6 in history, and I’m in the third year of an absolutely free education. I’m smart, I’m pretty, I’m good, and I’m clean.
“Look,” she stood and pirouetted, “absolutely no strings attached. Every man’s dream. Not for sale, Andy. For give-away.”
For one instant, I found myself indignant with Jack, with his entourage of hippies and freaks, his toy militants, his little harem. I was angry with Lou Feracca as well, with the whole scene. Okay, I was jealous. Undoubtedly I was jealous. But who could I blame except myself? I had most clearly been invited.
I heard myself declining the invitation. I was no Charles Creed, nor was I meant to be. I knew myself, and I knew my Linda. I knew even then where it would all lead, although the world was still so young in 1972.
“You are lovely,” I told Jodi Mac, “and I have promises to keep. Now it’s time for me to go keep them. Maybe I’ll see you again someday.”
Lou stopped me on my way out. “Whatever you think of the chick, man,” he whispered, “this is some very righteous hash.”
I kept my promises, leaving Jodi Mac, Lou, Jack, his young friend, a menagerie of others, the righteous hash, and heading for home. I left with a congested chest, thanks partly to Jodi Mac, who was indeed a lovely girl, but more, I think, to the whole scene. There had been something very right to that gathering, the easy high sixties mix of politics, sex and music I’d lost somewhere in grad school. Their ad hoc army managed a casual camaraderie I had not found elsewhere at Busiris. Half an hour I drove around Riverton, reflecting on what I’d felt at Jack’s apartment. Pulling finally into the drive, I identified it as innocence before experience. On the Coast I had already seen where these kids were moving. Jack knew as well. He’d seen it in New York, and at Kent State. Neither of us could have explained to the youngsters in that apartment where their ship was headed, but it wasn’t where they thought. The winds had already shifted. It was probably better we remained silent.
I told Linda little of what had transpired that evening, one of the few times I can recall having kept purposefully silent. I didn't see what good talk could do her. Or me.
And never again did I set eyes on Jodi Mac.
Not even the day of the march.
I have always considered October 25th, 1972 the high point of Tech’s golden sixties, the hour that the ship came in. It was the last and probably greatest act of serious protest at Busiris. Jack’s performance was spectacular.
I also identify October 25 as the beginning of serious trouble for Jack, the moment when a decision was made somewhere in the highest of lofty Old Main offices that this man, sooner or later, was history.
That day was one of the few that Charles reached the office before I did. When I arrived he was thumbing through his copy of Walden, the old Modern Library edition from which he had written his dissertation. Rose Marié had returned to Riverton with Timm and Jenny, but she declined participation in either the teach-in or march. Jack claimed to have seriously encouraged her to join the march, arguing that women and children would appeal to the media, but I doubt he pressed her too seriously. She was fretful and had asked him to cancel his speech or at least promise to remain on campus. I even sensed a certain anxiety in him, although he had brought his camera and a telephoto lens, and appeared to anticipate the day's events with the detachment of a reporter on assignment.
“Maybe Rose Marié and you and Linda and I could go out for dinner tonight,” I suggested. “To get her out of the house and let them know we're alive and still employed.”
“It's been only a few weeks since she had the baby,” Jack answered. “She doesn't get much sleep.” Nevertheless, he phoned, and Rose Marié thought yes, if she could get a sitter, dinner would be a welcomed escape from the house, and please be careful, you have two children to support now. Jack smiled, hung up the phone, then repeated the conversation to me. He made reservations for the smorgasbord at the Hilton’s Beefeater Room. I gathered Jane Austin materials for my British novel class.
“I canceled mine,” Charles admitted. “Told them I'd give my lecture in the quad at 11:00.”
“Eleven it is,” I told him and left, still slightly disappointed at not having been asked to speak myself.
I have always had difficulty explaining to students of the eighties and nineties the tedium which students of the sixties endured in the cause of social justice. I personally had sat for days of mind-numbing analysis at a long and tiring string of San Francisco teach-ins. Charles too had paid his dues in the ward politics of revolution, and even Busiris students, who today snooze through a 50-minute film on Toni Morrison, would sit for hours analyzing the morality of high altitude bombing, the physics of falling dominoes, or the relative demands of guns and butter in a zero sum economic system. In retrospect, I love them all.
Jack loved them all too. “In the sixties we played hard, smoked hard, fucked hard, and studied hard,” he would tell students in his last years at Busiris, leaving the balance of his comparison unspoken.
I did not hear the opening rounds of the teach-in, but I am sure they were deadly dull. At least half a dozen students spoke, each trying to condense four centuries of American imperialism and two millennia of western barbarism into ten or fifteen minutes. Marcus DeLotta did indeed return to campus, and spoke ahead of Jack, as did the Lutheran minister. Two bands had agreed to play—one electric and the other a folk group—so that the show had begun before my 9:00.
A wooden platform had been erected on the quad side of the Student Center, with a microphone and two large speakers. Fragments of talk and music drifted through the open window of Busiris Hall behind my discussion of Sense and Sensibility. Occasionally a song would lift, some electrified Dylan, or a chant of “Off the War” or “Peace Now,” the righteous anger of alienated nineteen-year-olds.
We finished class early, and I approached the quadrangle around 10:45, in the middle of Marcus DeLotta’s speech, a dry, even-toned sequence of syllogisms that left little room for disagreement or passion. Marcus was a wire-rimmed glasses radical, a genuine intellectual, a man so different from Jack that I could not help wondering if the celebrated Creed-DeLotta axis wasn’t mostly a paranoid fantasy of the department elders. What was the climate of Busiris Hall 313 in, say, the winter of 1970-71? Jack said little about those days.
Then again, Jack kept whole rooms of his personality closed to even his most intimate friends. Maybe Marcus DeLotta was Jack’s mirror image. No more protean individual ever existed than John Charles Creed.
The crowd grew as 10:00’s let out: the converted, the skeptical, and the casual passers-by. I recognized some of my own students and some of those who had shuttled in and out of the office for the past month and a half planning this event. I did not see Jodi Mac. The group was predominantly white. Autumn was in the air, and the gravity of the coming elections, and the thick scent of Something Important About to Happen. Placards filled the quad, mostly peace symbols and “Off the War” slogans . . . and in the hands of ten to twelve counter-demonstrators, “Draft these Punks Now” and “America: Love It or Leave It.”
Lou Feracca and I stood near the edge of the crowd, secure in our distance, hoping for a glimpse of Jack somewhere up front. Around 11:00 Jeremy Jones joined us, and Ben Allan Browne, and we chatted amiably.
“Beware the cameras,” Jones advised. “They'll be everywhere today.”
“They certainly were in Frisco. Not at Stanford, of course, they don’t have a building tall enough for photographing. In town. Every time we had one of these things. We’re not talking newspaper people, either. There must be a file on me somewhere this thick.”
“It can't be too fat if you got hired here,” Feracca answered with a glance at Jones.
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you,” Ben Allan warned.
“Well, Charles and Marcus are the men,” I said.
“Together again,” Jones agreed. “You don't see me up there. Someday I intend to be dean around here.”
“I’d settle for just a nice, tenured job,” I said.
The folk group was concluding Phil Ochs' “White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land” when Jack and Billy Jo Allen appeared beside the platform. Jack was wearing jeans and a worn denim jacket, with a white daisy pinned to the shoulder and two buttons: a Black Power fist and “McGovern for President.” I had not seen the jacket before. I suspected it was a borrowed prop, and felt a certain animosity toward what I considered two cheap tricks: changing costume to fit the scene and enlisting the B. S. A. president introduce him.
Allen's introduction was brief, adapted from the introduction of Bob Dylan at the Concert for Bangla Desh: “I want to bring you on a friend of us all, a friend of the white man and a friend of the black man, a friend of peace and justice, Dr. Charles Creed.”
Polite applause followed, the applause of a group which has endured a long and tedious morning and now senses a summing up. Jack adjusted the microphone higher, mostly for psychological effect, and began what we all quickly recognized as a moving, heart-felt speech. In contrast to most of the others, who had spoken informally and thus incoherently, Jack had prepared his words carefully beforehand, memorizing sentences and paragraphs of a text still extant in his papers. A performance worthy of the writer he would become, this speech convinced me that Charles Creed was—or could be—a writer co-equal to Kerouac, Kesey, and Mailer.
He began with Henry Thoreau and “Civil Disobedience,” describing Thoreau's one-man battle against the government he detested and the people he loved. Then he turned to Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, recounting the story briefly for an audience which knew neither author nor novel. “The Joads were a family on the move. The 300,000 dispossessed Oakies, of which they were but a small part, were a people on the move, out of the Dustbowl into the Promised Land, out of social injustice toward a new economic and political reality. Although these people only dimly sensed where they were headed, they knew they were setting themselves in open opposition to the authorities of their own day, the big owners and the cops those owners hired to protect themselves.
“The Oakies were an outlaw people, and thus a terror to those in control. Many Oakies died. They did what they had to do, by any means necessary. In the end justice prevailed, and the people could resume their real business of caring for families, living their lives, feeding the nation.
“Americans have always been a people on the move, a people on their way to a new Promised Land, intent on social and economic justice, not only for themselves, but for their posterity and for the world. Whatever policies their venal government pursues, Americans still seek a world that is safe for democracy. While they may be sometimes wrong-headed about what will make for democracy, their hearts are generous and their cause is justice for all. Justice is what the Joads wanted, and that's what the founders wanted when they became a people on the move and crossed the desperate ocean to confront the even more desperate continent. When Americans are on the move, you know the breath of injustice is upon their lives. And you can be assured that justice will finally prevail. By all means necessary.
“We are today a people on the move. Black people, white people, young and old, women and men. We are on the move because too much in this country offends the spirit of freedom and justice in which we all believe. We are on the move because too much of this country's future is being mortgaged to an omnipresent, cormorant war that nobody wants except the merchants of death.
“We are on the move because people are dying. Black people and white people and yellow people. People from this very town. People from this campus have died, friends and neighbors. Perhaps somebody you know has died. Perhaps you saw the list in last week's newspaper. Perhaps you recognized some of the names.”
Here Jack drew from his pocket an honor role of the city's war dead, published in the October 15 Standard-Republican, which, amid the awful silence of a group which does not wish to hear what it is compelled to hear, he began to read. The names came slowly out of his mouth, rang from the bell-shaped speakers beside him, falling like great stones into the pool of perhaps 1,000 people now gathered in the quadrangle, each name rippling outward in concentric circles through 1,000 minds, bouncing off the brick walls of Old Main, echoing off stone facade of Busiris Hall, widening finally to traffic on Washington Avenue, to the Hilton Hotel.
I thought of the Life photos pasted on our office wall, those rows of grainy black and white faces, pages of American hope and dreams dead in Vietnam. “Take a good look at those faces,” Jack would invite visitors with a theatrical sweep of his arm; “six pages of perfectly good eighteen- and nineteen-year-old male spunk. Five more pages on the reverse sides. Eleven pages of closely compacted 100% pure American youth pissed pointlessly away defending American corporate greed ten thousand miles off our westernmost shore.”
The names rolled on, awful with the weight of death, a tremendous and growing weight, until finally Jack’s voice faltered and he stepped quickly back from the microphone, wiping his nose on the sleeve of the denim jacket, struggling to regain composure. For a good thirty seconds the only sound was traffic outside the campus.
Again I could not help feeling ambivalent. Was this a soft side of Jack I’d not yet discovered, or was this a cheap trick? I couldn’t say.
It was effective. One thousand people were ready to follow Charles Creed off the edge of the earth. “So we are a people on the move," he finally continued. "A people out of control and thus a threat to our own government. A people in search of justice, and thus a threat to our own government. A people demanding life instead of death, and thus a threat to our own government. A universal Yes against the great unthinking, universal No.
“We have them on the ropes, the merchants of death and the political stooges they have hired to protect their interests. The days of Richard Nixon and Melvin Laird are numbered, and they know it. But our work is not complete until we have built a society free from prejudice and bias, a society which recognizes the integrity and worth of each individual, a society in which power is shared by all races, sexes, and classes. Only then we can rest in peace and justice and brotherhood, on this campus, in this nation, in this world. Today is not the day to sit down. We are still a generation in motion.”
Silence was turning to commotion, and all the weight of grief was gathering into a great ball of anger, ready, eager to direct itself against some palpable manifestation of injustice. The crowd was precisely where those who planned the teach-in hoped it would be, and the voices began.
“Let's move then,” somebody to the right of the stage shouted. "To the Hilton, to the Hilton!"
“Off the war!”
“Off Laird!”
“Move to the Hilton and confront the war!”
A bullhorn appeared. “The war-mongers are gathering today for a feast of death downtown at the Hilton,” a voice announced. “No law forbids a citizen from walking downtown. If a thousand American citizens feel like walking downtown, and if they happen to be walking to the same place, and if they happen to start singing a song or two, and if the song happens to be the same song—then what can the pigs do?”
The crowd had begun to move, propelled by students near the platform. Marcus DeLotta seized the platform microphone. “I'm gonna take a walk downtown,” he said and raised his hand in the clenched fist. “Power to the people.” Those who had wavered found themselves caught in the steady wash out of the quadrangle onto Washington Avenue.
Jones looked at Browne, Feracca, and me. “Gentlemen, the moment of decision has arrived,” he said. “Unfortunately I have a 1:00 and could not possibly make it to the Hilton and back by then. Nice to be saved from having to make the choice of conscience, eh?”
“It’s a beautiful day for a walk,” said Feracca. “You with me, Andy?”
Although the inner voice of common sense and a tight job market told me to be careful, I knew I could never face Jack in the office, or at dinner, if I remained on campus. My own currency with students was also on the line.
“I'm with Lou,” I said. “And Jack.”
Jones confronted us with an intensity heretofore absent. “For shit's sake,” he said, “don't get yourself arrested. And don't let our peach fuzz anarchist up there get himself arrested. The Vietnam War will not be decided in Riverton, Illinois. Neither will the election. Apart from pumping a few egos, this march means nothing at all. There are battles coming up on this campus that do mean something, where having you guys or not having you guys will make a difference. I don't care if you play today, but make sure you Romantics are here to work tomorrow. Keep out of the papers and out of jail. How the hell am I going to get you guys tenure when you pull this stuff?”
“It’s our civic duty, Ted.”
Jones shrugged his shoulders. “Remember, J C, you’re no Jesus Christ.”
“I'll go to save Charles,” I promised.
“From his image of himself.”
“From whatever,” Jones said, and turned away.
“Something is happening, but he don’t know what it is,” Browne whispered in my ear as we watched Dr. Jeremy Theodore Jones walk away from us, down the cement walk toward the neo-Gothic portals of ivy-covered Busiris Hall, the tall oaks arching over him, a limousine liberal without a limousine, the very picture of the fifties college professor on the fifties college campus on a fifties autumn afternoon.
“Chas was wrong. He never found the balls.”
“Just a tad bit confused.”
“Just a tad bit Ted,” Browne added.
“Well, get out of the new road if you can’t lend your hand,” sang Ben Allan. “The times, they be a-changin’.”
When we joined Jack, he was already in need of rescue. He was being accosted by a small group of counter-demonstrators, crew cut fraternity types with all the earmarks of Young Americans for Freedom. Remembering Finkelstein’s experience, I scanned the area for police, uniformed or undercover, ready to bust the main man as soon as a brawl began. Charles, however, seemed sensitive to a possible set-up and kept himself focused on the march, even while being jostled and baited.
“Commie symp,” shouted one male.
“Traitor.”
“Keep walking,” Jack whispered to Lou and me.
“You’re a fraud, Professor Creed,” taunted one kid in a Busiris letter jacket. “A coward and a fraud.”
Here Charles paused. “Eric?” he inquired, drawing away from us.
“Watch it, Jack.”
“You’re all cowards,” the young man insisted. “You sit here in your safe, comfortable job, while other people die defending the country. If American troops weren’t in Vietnam today, you’d be in Siberia. You use your free speech to undermine the very country that guarantees you free speech.”
“Well I’m guaranteed free speech,” growled Lou, “and I’m using it. So go fuck yourself, kid.”
Charles was more dispassionate. “Eric Marcuse,” he said. “The unfortunately named Eric Marcuse. Advanced comp. Am I right, Eric?”
The counter-demonstrator was reduced to his status as Jack’s student.
“I was, sir.”
“Eric the Anti-Red,” Lou cracked.
“What did you get in that class?” Jack asked.
“A minus.”
“You’re a bright fellow, Marcuse. There’s a truth to what you say. Not the truth but a truth. You’re welcome to believe it, as I’m free to believe what I believe.
“But you’re wrong if you think I’m a coward.” Charles flared slightly. “I know this redneck town, and I know Busiris Technical University. I know only too well what the speech I just gave could cost me. More than you and your daddy earn put together. When I walk downtown through those lines of FBI photographers, when I confront the Riverton police—as I will inevitably confront the Riverton cops—I put my neck and my job on the line. My job, my future, my ability to provide for my wife and my kids. Because of what I believe to be the best interests of America. So do the others here.
“I can name you students from this very school whose convictions drove them to Canada rather than participate in a war they consider immoral. They may never see their hometowns, their friends, or their families again. You might disagree with their opinions 100%, but you have to respect their courage, and mine.
“So I challenge you to match their courage. If you think America is best served by our military action in Vietnam, then I suggest you show the same courage and integrity. Put your life where your beliefs lie. Quit hiding behind your 2-S deferment and join the military.”
“To defend those people?” Marcuse indicated Creed’s army of tag-alongs.
“To defend America, if that’s the way you think America is best defended. Show me the courage of your convictions, Eric. America—fix it or forget it.”
We left the campus at 11:15. “Think we can catch him?” Ben Allan asked as we pushed toward the front of the line.
“Laird?”
“Laird.”
“You've lived longer than I. I don't even really know where the Hilton is. Jack and I are supposed to have dinner there tonight with the wives.”
“A mile and a bit ahead. The road takes a bend and drops over the bluff, and there you are. Right downtown.”
Reaching the front of the line, we joined Billy Jo Allen, Marcus DeLotta, the Lutheran minister, another older male whom I did not recognize, Jack and the paisley delight. “Jack was great,” she said. “Wasn’t he just the greatest ever?”
I did not ask about Jodi Mac.
Jack asked about numbers.
“At least 500 left campus,” I told him. “Maybe closer to 700. I don't know crowds very well, but most of them followed. Except the Old Ones. And Jeremy Jones. He had a class.”
“ ‘I'll send all the money you ask for, just don't ask me to come on along,’ “ quipped Jack, singing a Phil Ochs song. “Is that man a case or is he a case? How about the rest of the department, the New Ones? How about the National Tit?”
“Counting comma splices in this week's definition themes,” said Ben Allan.
“All that passion and intensity,” Jack mused loud, “expended on . . . commas and semicolons.”
“You weren’t persuasive enough, Chas,” Lou said.
“I’ll try harder next time.”
A skinny kid in sneakers, a tie-dyed shirt, and tatter-torn jeans came running up. “560 passed the Bonanza,” he reported.
“Forward it is,” said DeLotta.
Signs and banners strung out behind us in the October sun. “No more war.” “Fuck the war.” “Piece now.” “America yes / Vietnam yes / Nixon no.” “This War Bites Dick.” And the great peace signs, stylized doves that looked more like the Mercedes Benz logo. A march somewhere between autumn lark and political action.
“There are no cops,” somebody observed aloud. “No cops at all. I can't believe nobody phoned the fuzz.”
“There were television people at the rally,” Billy Jo said.
“Sometimes in the buildings, or on top of the buildings along a march,” DeLotta said. “You can sometimes see them on the buildings.”
“Like that up there.” Ben Allan pointed to the roof of the A&P towards which we were walking.
“Exactly like that up there.”
The shadows of several men could be seen on the roof, hands toward their faces.
“Now you know they didn't get themselves positioned up there with whatever they have in front of their noses within the last three minutes,” Jack mused.
Lou Feracca flashed the middle finger of his right hand in the direction of the roof. “Fuck ‘em,” he said. “Let ‘em photograph this.” Several students did the same. Becoming aware of the photographers overhead, the long line of marchers began raising hands, as if in salute, each a fist with the middle digit extended.
“With love to Dick in D. C. ,” Lou said. “Wish you were here.”
“Zey iz eferivare,” Jack said. “Perhaps you iz vun uf zem also . . . .”
“Jones’s last words were ‘keep out of the newspapers and out of jail,’ ” I told Jack.
He chuckled. “I got a dinner date tonight with the woman. At the Hilton. Rose Marié would shit her panties if I ended up in the slammer and couldn't take her to dine at the Hilton on the very day that the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America lunched at that same Hilton.”
Focusing his own telephoto lens on the figures atop the food store he shot away. Some of the figures ducked, or turned their backs. “The photographers photographed,” he said. “Say shit up there. Assholes.”
“Ahead,” somebody said, pointing to another roof further down the street.
“This whole route is pretty much staked out,” said DeLotta. “But there are no cops.”
“Busy with Laird?”
“Or waiting up ahead, or down the alleys.”
“You would think they would want to intercept us before the Hilton,” DeLotta said. “There are enough cops in Riverton to seal off the entire downtown area if they want. Not counting whatever else they have brought in for the occasion. They obviously know what we're up to, because they're up on those stores taking pictures. For whatever reason they don't want us stopped. Yet.”
“Maybe there are more people than they expected,” suggested Jack’s woman friend.
The chanting in the rear continued. “One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war.”
A single police car drove up the road beside the marchers, eliciting a chorus of jeers and another round of one-fingered salutes. As it reached the front of the march, a voice announced, “Attention students. You have no parade permit. You have no permit to parade down this or any other city street. Under provisions of the city code, you could all be subject to immediate arrest, imprisonment and fine. Disperse and go home. You have no parade permit. This is an illegal demonstration, and you could all be subject to arrest, imprisonment and fine. This in turn could affect your draft deferment status. Disperse and go home.”
The student with the bullhorn responded: “I am not a parade. I am an individual American citizen walking from Busiris University to the business district of this city to listen to the Secretary of Defense so I can vote intelligently in his country's free elections. I am not a parade.”
The patrol car continued its warning: “Disperse and go home. You are all subject to arrest, fine or imprisonment. . . .”
A red Chevy from TV 13 joined the squad car. From its window protruded a camera pointed at the demonstrators.
“They don't really want a confrontation,” Jack speculated. “They’ve got our pictures. Now they would like us to go home terrorized. Mr. Secretary hears nothing, sees nothing, and we are cowed into submission by a single squad car. What we've done so far won't send messages anywhere.”
“560 arrests would send a message,” said Jack’s friend.
“That's why there ain't gonna be no 560 arrests,” Jack said. “There won't be 100 arrests. And there won't be 100 expulsions either. We got 'em by the short hairs.”
“How much further?” We were nearing the lip of the bluff.
“Maybe ten minutes.”
DeLotta thought aloud. “At this point confrontation is inevitable. They must have figured that out by now. And it will be too big to bust everybody involved. They're not going to draw the line at the front door of the Hilton. . . .” He turned to one of the students. “Run ahead and look down the bluff, see what's going on down there.”
“Slow your pace. Slow your march,” the student with the bullhorn ordered.
The crowd hesitated.
DeLotta’s scout returned. “There’s a barricade just over the crest of the hill. They’re letting traffic through, so it’s not like the road is sealed off. They got about two dozen cop cars, a bunch of vans, and a whole fuckin' army of cops. Right over the hill.”
“I figured there was no way they’d bust us anywhere near the Hilton,” DeLotta said.
“Maybe we should switch streets, just to fuck them up a little,” Allen suggested. “Jump shift over to Jefferson.”
Jack agreed. “Good idea. A quick left and a right. Might get us out of the cameras, too.”
“If they got you scared, candy-ass, they got you,” Billy Jo Allen quoted, giving Jack a punch on the arm.
“Piss on ‘em. How portable are the barricades?”
“Just saw horses.”
“Plus patrol cars. Cars can move quicker than we can,” I pointed out.
“Jefferson,” Jack said, “is route 47 from the airport. If His Honor the Secretary is not yet at the Hilton, and if they're bringing him in 47, we could at least have our confrontation where he would see it. We might ruin an otherwise pleasant Republican publicity stunt.”
“We’d have to move quickly,” Billy Jo warned, “or they will cut us off there.”
“They'll reroute Laird as soon as we move onto Jefferson,” I said.
“Maybe,” Jack decided. “If they have the street lined with party hacks, they might bring him in that way anyway. Maybe he's already there. If there are a lot of people on Jefferson the cops won’t know who to bust. And we get in trouble, we can just melt into the woodwork.”
The bullhorn clicked on.
“Forget it,” Jack ordered. “They will hear below the hill. Turn and the rest will follow. By the time the cops figure out what's up, we're on Jefferson. And pick it up.'“
Jefferson Street—Illinois 47, and the main one-way street to downtown Riverton—was, as Jack had anticipated, lined with flag-waving patriots eager to cheer the Secretary of Defense. This was no country for long haired protesters.
“Now the shit hits the fan,” Lou whispered to Jack. “And it ain’t the fuckin’ cops that worry me.”
“Looks like Mr. Secretary, if he’s coming this way, has not been through yet,” said DeLotta. “And scarcely a pig in sight.”
"With Pharaoh’s tribe of rednecks, who needs police?” I asked.
The students, walking behind the townspeople, were onto Jefferson in large numbers before they were noticed. Finally one tattooed man in his late twenties, a yellow Caterpillar Tractor cap on his head, turned around and looked squarely at DeLotta and Billy Jo Allen. “Why don't you and your fag nigger friend here take a one-way trip to Russia?”
Schooled in avoiding conflict, Marcus answered not a word. Billy Jo could not resist a verbal left hook: “Because I like fuckin’ your sister too much.”
They were at each other instantly, Caterpillar Tractor taking the first fall, pulling Billy Jo with him. Jack and Lou threw themselves on the pair, and two other rednecks joined in. Then all was shouts and shoving, the patriots beefier than the demonstrators, but already outnumbered with more student reinforcements arriving all the time. Even Ben Allan was cocking an arm, at no one in particular. Just when it looked as if the patriots would beat a quick retreat, there appeared from the south a pair of police cars, red lights flashing.
“Here we go, brother,” shouted Jack.
“Finished before we started,” lamented Billy Jo. “Let's give it to them while we can.” His left lip was bleeding.
But the patrol cars were in no hurry, trolling in at 25 mph, coming not to disrupt a riot or to intercept demonstrators, but to escort the Secretary of Defense of the United States to his luncheon address. Subdued cheering could be heard above the noise of battle.
“It's fucking Laird!” somebody shouted. Hostilities ceased.
A great cry arose: "Laird, Laird, Laird, Laird."
Meanwhile from below the hill, wrong way on a one-way street, came a dozen Riverton squad cars. Quickly they formed a roadblock across Jefferson at the edge of the bluff. Patrolmen jumped out and rushed forward to arrest demonstrators, patriots, or both. Out of nowhere hissed a canister of tear gas, then another.
“Gas, gas!” somebody shouted. “Clear out!”
A squad car speaker barked orders: “Stay where you are. You are all under arrest. Anyone leaving the area will be charged with resisting arrest. Stay where you are. This is the police speaking. You are all under arrest.”
Townspeople and students alike fell away on all sides: through alleys, into businesses along Bootz and Jefferson, toward the black limousine and its escorts. Police pursued, and patrol cars moved to block the side streets. I recall at least two more canisters of tear gas.
Thus it happened that in a police miscommunication of galactic proportions, Melvin Laird was escorted directly toward the barricade of patrol cars at the edge of the bluff, toward the spreading tear gas, toward the squads of police attempting to arrest students, toward the demonstrators who, retreating from the police, found themselves face to face with the embodiment of national evil they had come only half expecting to confront. Briefly I caught sight of Laird in his black limo, sandwiched between the mayor of Riverton and the Republican Senator from Illinois. He seemed visibly shaken at the rising tide of protest and chaos. At least I wanted to think he was shaken, as I’ve always wanted to believe that what he learned in Riverton was a small factor in his decision to resign from office a month thereafter.
“It's Laird for real!” DeLotta shouted in great triumph. “Pinch yourself and squeal, pig Laird.”
Jack sized the bullhorn. “There's secret service here. Get out of here before you get hurt.” As if to underline his warning, three shots rang out—into the air, the Standard-Republican reported—and Laird's driver, laying hard on the horn, gunned the limo into reverse, backed up 50 yards, then rushed down a side street and out of sight. Riverton police charged after.
“Your jacket,” Feracca yelled at Creed. “Ditch your jacket and put on my suit coat. Look like a capitalist pig, for chrissake. I have a tie and white shirt. Maybe they won't notice the tear in your jeans.”
“Fuck 'em all,” Jack shouted back, running to beat hell.
“Out of jail and out of the newspapers,” I repeated. “Remember? And we got a dinner date tonight.”
We ducked into the Fireplace Shoppe on Bootz.
“Jesus, would Rose Marié be pissed,” Jack panted, accepting Lou’s suit coat. “I’m looking for a set of andirons for a house-warming gift,” he told the clerk. “Brass if you have them. Quite a ruckus going on out there.”
The headlines in the evening Riverton Standard-Republican read, “Student Demonstration Cancels Laird Talk. 117 Arrested, Released.” A picture of Jack addressing the rally in the quadrangle appeared on the front page, above the caption, “Professor John Charles Creed Addresses Busiris Students Prior to Riot.” Only Marcus DeLotta, “a former member of the Busiris English Department,” was mentioned as actually participating in the riot.
In the Beefeater Room of the Hilton Hotel I raised a glass of California zinfandel “to good old American freedom. Out of jail, if not out of the newspapers. 50% ain’t bad.”
“Shit,” Charles said, looking sideways at Rose Marié. “The only thing that's going to piss them off is that the paper made me a full professor.”