BY LANGDON WINNER*

The Battle of People's Park (cont.)
Rolling Stone Magazine, June 14 1969

"We are committed to stand with the poor and alienated who are trying to create a new world on the vacant lots of the old." - Rev. Richard York ol the Berkeley Free Church

"The property belongs to the Regents of the University of California and will not be available to unauthonzed persons." - U.C. Chancellor Roger Heyus

In Berkeley last week a long-feared nightmare suddenly achieved reality. The Machine became a weapon. Bureaucracy, bulldozers and shotguns merged in efficient unity and struck forth with insane viciousness. When the tear gas had cleared and the Machine had done its work, a sturdy chain link fence enclosed a piece of land which had once been the People's Park. In the action 47 students and street people were arrested. Over 100 were injured, at least 35 of these with gunshot wounds. Three persons lay in hospitals near death; one died. Helicopters patrolled the city, armed with tear gas. Two thousand National Guard troops marched the streets with fixed bayonets.

Although this story is far from over, the following facts should indicate how far the times have taken us.

The People's Park became an issue here in early April when several residents of the south campus area decided that an ugly 3/4-block vacant field then being used as a parking lot could be developed into a park for the benefit of the whole community. In a section of town in which open space is virtually non-existent, the need for such a park had long been evident. The plan now was simply to move into the muddy lot, work together on Sunday afternoon and transform the land into a Peoples' Park with green grass, play equipment, a fishpond, and picnic tables.

For five weeks that idea worked perfectly. Hundreds of students, street people and straight people joined together in the warm sun to hoe the earth and lay down new sod. There were no blueprints and no managers. People worked spontaneously on whatever they pleased. Nearby Telegraph Avenue merchants made generous donations to help cover the costs of the enterprise. As the weeks went by the ugly piece of property was transformed into a quaint but beautiful gathering place for several generations of Berkeleyans.

Unfortunately for the people, the vacant lot has an obtuse and angry landlord. The University of California owns the property having paid 1.3 million dollars for it several months ago. It was not happy with the park.

The University's objections to the project are not based on a better alternative idea. The Regents' position is, "We own it. Get out!" Over the last decade U.C. officials had considered building dormitories, apartments, playing fields and God knows what else on the land, but had never made up their minds. For a while the dormitory idea seemed best. Then a professor in the College of Environmental Design did a study which pointed out that the only thing which distinguished existing dormitories from prisons was that the dorms were named after famous alumni. The idea was dropped. At the time the people moved into the park the University had not announced definite plans for the area. The land had sat vacant for nearly a year.

With the coming of the park, however, the University suddenly took interest. As the soil blossomed with flowers, Chancellor Roger Heyns and his assistants blossomed with rhetoric which seem to have been taken directly from Dr. Strangelove and Catch-22. Responding to "an important campus need," the Chancellor announced that he had decided to build a soccer field to accommodate "the many thousands of students who will be attending this University in the years to come." Vice Chancellor Earl Cheit defended this plan in terms of U.C.'s need to retain its prestige among the other large Universities of the land. Thanking the builders of tbe park for temporarily improving the Regents' property, .Chiet cited a study which showed that Berkeley had slipped drastically in the intercollegiate playground ratings. "The University ranks last in soccer fields," he announced with a dramatic flare. At a campus in which students and faculty hive long learned that the Chancellor's Office is a wellspring of lies and cynicism, the announcements were greeted with amused disbelief.

But tbere was nothing to be amused about.

At 3:00 in thc morning of May 15th the fence builders arrived accompanied by 300 police in bulletproof vests and full battle array. Working with amazing speed the fence company dug holes, laid cement and put up a cyclone fence around the park. By 10:00 the job was done. Students and street people looked on in sorrow at the spectacular display of engineering as police helicopters whirred overhead. Chancellor Heyns, who had broken his promise not to begin the fence in the dead of night, had conveniently left town.

At noon of the same day a rally was held on the U.C. campus three blocks north of Peoples' Park. An anxious crowd of 6,000 persons listened to student and faculty speakers decry the Chancellor's action. "The Park was a little island of peace and hope in a world made filthy and hopeless by war and injustice!' declared poet Denise Levertov of the English Department. An atmosphere of dismay and solemn anger hung in the air. After half of the scheduled hour of speech-making the crowd would wait no longer. At the conclusion of a talk by the student body President-elect most of the people present spontaneously turned and walked down Telegraph Avenue :to "take back the park."

The four hour battle which followed is difficult to describe and even more difficult to believe. In many ways it followed the pattern of street fighting and police violence which has now become the American tradition - rock throwing on both sides, tear gas canisters thrown back and forth, pepper-fog machines carried by National Guardsmen befouling the air: with a choking mist, police beating victims at random, scattered arrests, and both sides exhilirated by the action. What was new about the Battle of Peoples Park was that for the first time in recent history the police gunned down white students in the streets. Shotguns loaded with buckshot, birdshot and rocksalt were fired into crowds leaving dozens: of blood covered bodies Iying in wait for overloaded ambulances. Late in the afternoon Berkeley hospitals were filled with injured victims of the melee and called for medical help from other cities. One of these human targets died.

No one is yet certain exactly who gave the orders to shoot. It is certain, nevertheless, that the crowd of demonstrators had no warning that such means were to be used against them. Sheriff Frank Madigan of Alameda County offered the following rationale for the slaughter. "I have reason to believe," he said, "that the radicals have developed an antidote for tear gas." Hence the shotguns were necessary.

But aside from the wet handkerchiefs which tear gas victims held over their faces, there were no such antidotes in evidence. It seems instead that the police had grown frustrated by the fact that their methods have not quelled protests in Berkeley, Chicago or anywhere else. The turmoil in America has not declined as repressive technology has increased. The cops apparently felt that since their heralded gas and gadgets have not worked, it was time to get back to the fundamentals - good old fashioned killing.Was there provocation on both sides? Is it true that all parties on the streets were looking for a fight? These questions must be asked.

With regard to the students and street people the matter of confrontation with the cops was an everconscious possibility. It was certainly not (as Ronald Reagan believes) the concealed goal of the park development. The park was a beautiful issue not because it promised a chance to begin the street fighting again. It was beautiful because it gave segments of the Berkeley community of widely separated ideologies the opportunity to work together on a project which transcended their hoary old doctrinal conflicts. When one has a rake in his hand and sweat on his brow it makes little difference whether he is a Trotskyist or follower of Eugene McCarthy. Certainly there were some who saw this as merely the next stage in an ongoing revolutioriary struggle. For most of the persons who actually worked the land, however, the idea was ( 1 ) that people could work together to create something beautiful out of something ugly, and (2) that the decision on how the land should be used was rightfully a choice for the community rather than for an insensitive University Machine. As architect Allan Temko pointed out, the project was an experiment in environmental aesthetics and democratic participation.

The role of the University, police and Governor in all of this is of a peculiar sort. As parts of the Machine they were programmed for violence. When did the authorities call the cops for the May 15th confrontation? In early Pebruary. Although this may seem strange, the fact of the matter is that the City of Berkeley has remained under Governor Reagan's proclamation of a "State of Emergency" for the last four months. Originally a response to the Third World student strike of the winter quarter, the proclamation has remained in effect despite the fact that for the last eight weeks of the period there had been nothing.like a demonstration in Berkeley.

In effect this means that the legal definition of Berkeley's normal condition is turmoil. At the slightest sign of controversy the authorities are entitled to call massive groups of police and to suspend the right of public meetings. In this instance all tbat Chancellor Heyns had to do was decide to build a fence. Three hundred cops showed up automatically.

When I asked the Governor's press secretary why such repressive measures remained in effect in times of peace, he responded that it was in order to give "1aw enforcement" the efficient tools to do its iob. When I pointed out to hun that this was less "efficient" if one was thinking of his rights and liberties under the First Amendment, the secretary responded that "the people," through the Governor," had spoken."

The frightening thing is that I suppose he was right. The procliamation which brought the shooting of dozens of young Berkeleyans is something which both the Governor and the public apparently wish to make permanent. While allegedly a means of restoring 'Law and Order," the State of Emergency was in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy of violence. When the violence returned it was met with wide applause.At this writing, four days have passed since the shooting took place. No public group (including the U.C. faculty) has bothered to suggest that the use of guns in crowd control was anything other than good sound practice.

On the morning following the Thursday riot I walked with several friends through the streets which had contained the battle. Almost simultaneously each of us recalled the words of a Bob Dylan song: "The National Guard hangs 'round the door/I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more." Indeed, the National Guard did hang around each door on Teiegraph Avenue. Young men with army uniforms, sideburns, mustaches, and M-l's stood joking with passersby hawking the chicks and "preventing anarchy." As I looked into their faces I was not certain whether I was seeing Nuremberg 1936 or the Monterey Pop Festival 1967.

The troops still occupy Berkeley, herding the demonstrators back and forth through the streets with fixed bayonets. It is now virtually certain that the, University's vacant lot will never become a People's Park. Somewhere, someone has decided that the piece of land will be a graveyard before it is a park - a graveyard for many of the ideals of this generation and possibly for the bodies of those who believed that a simple dream could be made real.

*Langdon Winner was a student at Berkeley, He was also a pianist with experience divided about equally between rock and roll and jazz gigs. He was among the coalition of street people and students who built People's Parkand had been a first-hand observer of all that has gone down since the state shut down the park and turned on the tear gas and riflery.

The modern reader should be aware that these events came a year after the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago when police rioted, attacked demonstrators and only a miracle prevented any deaths. The year after People's Park during a demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio four students were shot dead.

Maybe there were elements in the People's Park incident that could be seen as a dress rehearsal for the subsequent Anti-Vietnam campaigns at Berkeley - certainly the same faces appear amongst the speakers and organisers - but what was distinctive about this period was the huge gulf in understanding between radical and conservative forces. It was the generation gap. It never seemed to occur to anyone to negotiate.