Robert (J.S.) Ross was a friend. I met him at Freshman Rendezvous. He later went on to be active in Students for Democratic Society and was featured in the Tom Hayden's, Reunion book. He writes on "participatory democracy" and I'm interested to know if I "have it." I think it "everyone agreeing to a policy." But in SDS and the Port Huron statement, that can be pretty complicated!
His sources include this one and this one. It includes, by the way, Arnold Kaufman!
The Radical Liberal, was a book published by Dissent is a single issue, an then by Atherton Press in 1968. It is reviewed in Dissent here.
Frithjof Bergmann was at home at the University of Michigan. I was in his "Philosophy in Literature" before he wrote his book on freedom (On Being Free 1977).
I would say not long after his appointment. He was on my Ph.D. committee which came after the book and that was his middle period. I wasn't in touch with him during his advanced period, where he was concerned with New Work.
Here is his Wikipedia here.
Abraham Kaplan was my chair of my dissertation, and a favorite teacher of mine. His Wikipedia posting is here.
I wanted to include the pictures. they were so fresh and vibrant. I will include Professor Bergman as a young man just graduating from Princeton. Later, you'll see him as more mature, and then as an older man. Bergman is in the center.
And Arnold Kaufman.
The next day, Bill Gamson remarked on how students opposed to the teach-in had come into one of the late-late seminars, and a genuine debate ensued.
“This was our purpose — to promote serious examination of United States policy,” Gamson said. “I learned something I should have known — how bright and serious our students are. The closeness between faculty and students was most moving…. I think the approach last night was clearly superior to our original plan.”
Even before the teach-in, organizers had been calling friends and colleagues in their disciplines at other campuses. Two days after the Michigan event, faculty held a teach-in at Columbia University. Two weeks later came the teach-in at Michigan State and many more all that spring — Chicago, Wisconsin, Western Reserve, MIT, Harvard, the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins, San Francisco State, Penn State, Texas, Illinois, Oregon. A new thing had been born, and an antiwar movement had begun in earnest.
Jack Rothman saw the teach-in as proof of his friend Arnold Kaufman’s “radical liberal” strategy — a middle way in progressive politics between the moderation of petition-gatherers and the rejectionist strike tactics of radicals.
Marshall Sahlins, to whom the teach-in idea had “occurred” in the midst of a tense meeting of minds, thought the tactic caught on in part because, like SDS, it started at Michigan. “It may have been a cultural hinterland,” he wrote later, “but being ‘out there’ afforded Michigan ‘the privilege of historical backwardness’ (as Trotsky put it). Relatively uncommitted to the existing forms of dissent, the anti-war activists at Michigan were free to surpass them.”
When Sahlins died in 2021 after a long and influential career at Michigan and the University of Chicago, the New York Times‘s obituary read in part: “The teach-in created an intellectual bridge between older leftists like Professor Sahlins and the budding activists of the baby boom generation. And as one of the earliest high-profile protests against America’s intervention in Vietnam, it set a template for future antiwar activism.”
Sources include author interview with Zelda Gamson; the papers of Arnold Kaufman at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; Jack Rothman, “The Radical-Liberal Strategy in Action: Arnold Kaufman and the First Teach-In” (draft in the Kaufman papers); interviews conducted by U-M students with teach-in participants on the teach-in’s 50th anniversary in 2015, available at “Resistance and Revolution: The Antiwar Movement at the University of Michigan, 1965-1972“; Matthew Newman, “Vietnam: U-M faculty’s historic teach-in of 30 years ago,” Michigan Today, October 1995; Marshall Sahlins, “The Teach-Ins: Anti-War Protest in the Old Stoned Age,” Anthropology Today, February 2009; Michigan Daily; Detroit News; Detroit Free Press.
The event was set to begin at 8 p.m. on March 24. The first bomb threat was phoned in at 7:35 at East Quad, where a documentary film about Vietnam was being shown in the lounge of Greene House. It was quickly ruled a hoax.
Crowds of students began to cram the Fish Bowl on their way to the Angell Hall auditoriums. Bill Gamson conceded to a Detroit reporter that many were there out of sheer curiosity, but “this is fine for our purposes, because curiosity about the course of our policy in Vietnam is what we hope to satisfy.”
Counter-protesting students circulated with posters: “Better Dead Than Red,” “Peace Through Strength” and “Drop the Bomb.” “This isn’t fair at all,” one of them told the Daily‘s reporter. “They aren’t presenting the other side. These people want another Munich.”
The second bomb threat came in just at 8 as students were filling the seats. Police cleared them out, checked the rooms, then waved them back in.
By now it was clear the organizers had underestimated student interest. More than 2,000 students — some said 3,000 — were now settling into seats or listening from the lobbies. Serious analyses from the speakers drew studious, rapt attention throughout the long evening in spite of a third bomb threat, quickly dispelled, at 10 p.m.
At midnight, with the main speakers done, the crowd went outdoors for an out-and-out protest rally. Here the talk became less academic, taking on the sound of more radical protests to come. “We should get on the side of the people, not their oppressors,” Frithjof Bergmann told the students, “even if it means linking arms with Red China in Southeast Asia. I am in favor of getting out even if we cannot get a negotiated settlement… We debauch the words liberty and freedom when we claim that is what we fight for. Let no one say that we are losing Vietnam, because it never belonged to us.”
Then it was back inside for seminars and movies, most of them led by students. At 3 a.m. there was a break for coffee, and an exodus to the dorms ensued. But several hundred die-hards stayed for another round of seminars, then a plenary session at 6 and a final rally on the Diag at 7 a.m.
Near the end, a student told the Daily’s reporter: “I’m just a lowly freshman, but this teach-in shows me what a university has to be.” Another sat on his Honda at the back of the crowd. “I’d never really thought very much about this,” he said, “but after tonight I think we should get out of Vietnam.”
Curiosity about the course of our policy in Vietnam is what we hope to satisfy.– William Gamson, professor of sociology
Now 200 instructors signed in favor of a teach-in, a significant fraction of the whole faculty.
U-M administrators came on board, too, in no small part because the powerful dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, the economist William Haber (father of Al Haber, a founder of SDS), liked the new plan. (The elder Haber made a point of telling Frithjof Bergmann he supported both the teach-in and the organizers’ position on Vietnam.)
When Arnold Kaufman talked to Haber’s staff on the phone the next day, he was quickly assured that the four big Angell Hall auditoriums, plus rooms in Mason Hall, plus public-address and movie equipment would be at the organizers’ disposal.
In these early days of what was not yet called the anti-war movement, there were few big names to call upon for major public addresses, especially on short notice. So the organizers invited three credentialed but little-known academics — Arthur Waskow, a historian at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies; John Donahue, an MSU anthropologist who had done fieldwork in Vietnam; and Robert Browne, an economist who been a State Department advisor in Vietnam.
Immediately, critics roasted the planners for failing to invite anyone to speak in favor of the Johnson administration’s escalation of the war. Arthur Eastman, a professor of English, argued that any teach-in — a term he considered “unfitting” — without a range of views was nothing but propaganda, “public noise,” a pressure tactic that violated “the sanity of democratic institutions to move slowly and carefully.”
The “radical liberal” Arnold Kaufman summarized the planners’ defense. “We were unimpressed by the argument that in order genuinely to teach, every conceivable, or even every influential, point of view must be formally represented,” he would write soon. “It is not as if the government of the United States is unable to find a way to place their position before the people…. The democratic political process requires that all points of view be effectively represented over time and on various occasions — not that they all be represented on every occasion.” (Later, Kaufman would conclude that since many “unthinking” people believed every teach-in should include all points of view, “it was an error of strategy, not of principle, to fail to invite pro-administration speakers.”)
Ads were hurried into the Daily and the Ann Arbor News. Professors fanned out to dorms, churches, fraternities and sororities to spread the invitation to students. In a key concession, University housing officials agreed to “late hours” for women who typically faced a curfew. The planners were hoping a thousand students would show up.
