Berkeley Free Speech Movement, continued
Posted by amy at March 16th, 2007
What does this all mean? In the end, the lessons from the BFSM are this – the University and the Government could only see the student’s activities as related to the larger issue of communism, which would determine the path/influence their reaction to student protests for the next few years and because the participants didn’t see their behavior in any way influenced by communism and primarily related to their experiences in the civil rights movement, participant historians failed to the University’s reaction as anything other than anti-progressive. While the Berkeley Free Speech movement, for the media in general, can be seen as the the beginning of white student protest, it is far more closely related to the McCarthyism and a cultural belief that still saw any dissident speech as related to communism.
The Berkeley Free Speech emerged organically from the many student groups affected. Unlike future protests, the strike at Columbia in particular, the event was not pre-planned, there were no major organizations backing and directing it and despite Mario Salvo’s public role, there were no real leaders. And it is this specific snapshot in the movement that best represents the Marshall Bloom’s own political inclinations.
Finally, the BFSM introduced the FBI to hundreds of students they could add to their watch list, (in addition to Clark Kerr), all listed as either communists or communist sympathizers. When J. Edgar Hoover was questioned about the BFSM by the House Appropriations subcommittee on March 14, 1965, “he reported that that there were 43 persons with subversive backgrounds” in the FSM, including five faculty members. He said the Communist Party had exploited the FSM.” He testified despite reports from his own field officers that there were barely a handful of communist sympathizers involved.
In 2004, following an in-depth investigation into the FBI’s investigations of the Free Speech Movement, the San Francisco Gate published an article detailing the FBI’s file on Savio – who wasn’t active in any other movement following the BFSM. Among other things, the FBI:
– Collected, without court order, personal information about Savio from schools, telephone companies, utility firms and banks and compiled information about his marriage and divorce.
– Monitored his day-to-day activities by using informants planted in political groups, covertly contacting his neighbors, landlords and employers, and having agents pose as professors, journalists and activists to interview him and his wife.
– Obtained his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of federal rules, mischaracterized him as a threat to the president and arranged for the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies to investigate him when he and his family traveled in Europe.
– Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a “Key Activist” whose political activities should be “disrupted” and “neutralized” under the bureau’s extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.
“The bureau took these actions against Savio even after San Francisco FBI agents repeatedly told bureau headquarters that he was not connected with, or influenced by, any subversive political group or foreign power.”
Salvo wasn’t alone, Jo Freeman another student active at Berkeley found that both the FBI monitored her and Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (MSC) who planted a spy on the Berkeley campus following Freedom Summer. Freeman details what essentially became a feedback loop between the two organizations in her book At Berkeley in the Sixties: Education of an Activist, 1961-1965. The summer following the FSM protests, Freeman returned to the south, to work on voter registration. Local newspapers ran articles titled “MISS JO FREEMAN, WHITE FEMALE PROFESSIONAL COMMUNIST AGITATOR,” and the following summer, in August of 1966, the Jackson Daily News ran an editorial “Professional Agitator Hits All Major Trouble Spots.” Complete with 5 photos. The publication of the photos made Freeman Klan bait and effectively ended the fieldwork she could do in Mississippi.
Connecting civil rights with communism was crucial for the white power “Because the culture of anti-Communism permeated the South. Implying that civil rights workers were Communists associated two evils with each other and reinforced Southern beliefs that outside agitators were a foreign as well as a domestic threat.”
These accounts parallel Marshall Bloom’s. In a letter from Bloom to the president of Amherst College, Bloom writes that his southern landlord thought he was a communist, a charge Bloom found unlikely and a bit amusing.
