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By Katherine Rotherham '62 I arrived at Berkeley in 1959, a refugee from John Birch conservatism and the conventionality of Orange County. This was before the Free Speech Movement, before beatniks were replaced by hippies, and the University still acted in loco parentis--the dorms were not co-ed, lock-out was 10 p.m. on weeknights. My fellow students were a strange mix of '50s naiveté and '60s cynicism. We watched the Mickey Mouse Club on TV, drank beer at Larry Blake's, and ate hamburgers at Si's. But we also saw Ingmar Bergman films at the Cinema Guild and began to question the assumptions of the post-war society and to chafe under the rules of a parental university. I was certainly no radical, but I was looking for a place that let me choose how to be, and Berkeley certainly did that. I soon found a home on the staff of the Daily Californian. The paranoia of McCarthyism was ever-present and hit particularly close to home when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held its hearings in San Francisco in May 1960. The Daily Californian editorialized against the Committee, and students organized a peaceful demonstration at San Francisco City Hall. We were shocked when police used fire hoses to dislodge the demonstrators and then arrested them in what was called a "student riot." Soon after that, HUAC sympathizers produced a film, Operation Abolition, condemning the demonstrators as Communist-inspired activists. It claimed that the demonstrations had been orchestrated by the Russians and that "gold from Moscow" had paid for the Daily Cal editorials. These events just aggravated the growing tension between the new student activists and the University power structure. In the fall, pressure was mounting for outside control over the content of the paper. Both the Alumni Association and some members of the Board of Regents were calling for changes; as a result, the ASUC Executive Committee moved to impose a board of censorship to clear all of the paper's editorial content. The Daily Californian got a temporary restraining order (with the help of some Boalt faculty) against adoption of the new board on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Amid great turmoil, the ASUC appealed the order, got it lifted, and the censorship board was reinstated.  The next day, the Daily Cal's front-page headline announced: WE RESIGN. Our resignation statement, signed by most of the staff, was printed below. (It later appeared in the annual report of the California legislature's Committee on Un-American Activities.) We quickly regrouped and began publishing the Independent Californian from temporary offices in Stiles Hall. The Berkeley Gazette let us use its printing facilities. (A "scab" staff was recruited to put out the Daily Cal.) The Independent Californian started as a daily--a big undertaking for us. No longer underwritten by the ASUC and with no logistical support from the University, we not only had to write and edit the stories, we also had to sell the papers each day. The University was not sympathetic to our cause. Accused of being Commies and subversives, we could not sell the paper on campus, supposedly because we were not a "University publication." Neither were Newsweek or Time, we pointed out, both of which were readily available on campus--although those, of course, were not Commie publications. So we stood at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph and at other campus entry points, hawking our paper. Many students weren't too sympathetic, either, and made a wide detour around us, avoiding eye contact. It was a tense experience for many of us. Several students had to quit the paper, compelled by the fear that they were jeopardizing their fathers' government security clearances. Others left because of pressure from the campus ROTC program. It was a frightening but exciting time, and the Independent Californian did a good job of covering the campus. The paper lasted 13 issues, two weeks as a daily and three as a weekly. Then it quietly folded. After all, we were students, midterms were upon us, and funding was in short supply. Also, we ran out of steam. I returned to the Daily Cal in the spring, but it just wasn't the same. I left the paper in the middle of that semester. My experiences at Berkeley and with the Daily Cal taught me an important lesson--to view the world, the media, and public opinion with a questioning mind. |
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