20 Century

Created 6/10/1997
Go to Brad DeLong's Home Page

Senator William Knowland and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement

from Milton Viorst, Fire in the Streets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 284-5

At the [Republican] National Convention in San Francisco in July [1964], the party moderates who had backed Rockefeller made a last-ditch effort to deny Goldwater the nomination. In desperation, they turned to Berkeley to recruit an army of demonstrators.... [T]he hapless army of anti-Goldwater irregulars made the Berkeley campus a further target of the conservatives' wrath.

Former Senator William Knowland, Goldwater's state chairman, concluded it was the last straw when... organizers... announced early in September that they would picket the Oakland Tribune. Run by the Knowland family, the Tribune was an extremely conservative and powerful daily.... The Tribune had the power to hurt the unversity badly by a... campaign [against the higher education bond issue on the November ballot]....

Shortly after the picketing [of the Tribune] began, Tribune reporters queried administrators of the Berkeley campus over their plans for banning... political activity on the so-called Bancroft strip.... They informed the administrators that... the strip, contrary to common belief, was not on city-owned land... but on university grounds, subject to... limitations on political activity imposed by the Regents.... [T]he Berkeley administration decided that [Senator] Knowland could not be ignored....

On September 14, [1964.] the dean of students announced that tables would be permitted on the Bancroft strip no more, and that speechmaking and leafleting would also be prohibited. It was the administration's efforts to suppress the established traditions of the Bancroft strip that sired the Free Speech Movement and became the casus belli of the Berkeley uprising...

20 Century

Created 6/10/1997
Go to Brad DeLong's Home Page

Professor of Economics J. Bradford DeLong, 601 Evans
University of California at Berkeley; Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027 phone (510) 642-6615 fax
delong@econ.berkeley.edu
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/
ÿ