Nation: At War with War

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All through the restive winter and early spring, the campus atmosphere had been heavy with intimations of bomb plots, and sometimes with actual whiffs of black powder. Last week's actions suddenly changed much of that mood. For one thing, dissent broadened so abruptly that in most places the far-left fringes were simply overwhelmed. At a Columbia University rally, Kent State Student Fred Kirsch was loudly applauded when he told a crowd of 3,000: "Look, I read Jerry Rubin's book. I talked about violent overthrow myself. But when those rifle bullets cracked past my head, I suddenly realized you can't fight pigs with bricks. Whatever we do, it's got to be peaceful."

Despite that caution, enough destructive urge remained on scores of campuses to stir dangerous action. Firebombings seemed to be the favorite tactic of extremists; ROTC facilities were their frequent targets. Occasionally violence spilled off the campus in a familiar pattern of window breaking, traffic disruption and other random harassment—the same type of activity that preceded the Kent State tragedy (see following story).

At the University of Wisconsin, 83 students were arrested after 20 major firebombings. Governor Warren Knowles called out 2,100 National Guardsmen to cope with the violence. As elsewhere, though, there was a sort of Dada contrast between incendiary violence and collegiate languor: couples walking hand in hand, playing tennis, spinning Frisbees, sailing across Lake Mendota. After one of many confrontations with the National Guard, a student shrugged nervously: "Well, I just threw my first rock." The atmosphere was entirely different at Grinnell College in Iowa. When protesters broke a window by accident, they collected $14.39 to replace it.

New Coalescence

At the University of New Mexico, dissenting students fought with "straights" over whether the flag should be lowered to half-staff to honor the Kent State dead. Three of the dissenters came away with knife wounds. One confrontation at U.C.L.A. was often something of an absurdist frolic, with students advancing on and retreating from the police—the "blue meanies"—in a sort of Keystone Kops ballet. Police would chase kids frantically past heedless couples smooching on benches. When one shift of police went off duty, the students shouted: "Manatia, pigs!" A cop would smile and wave goodbye.

On far more campuses, though, tens of thousands of moderate students brought a new seriousness coupled with a kind of wounded pride to the revived antiwar movement. Said Ted Gup, of the National Lobby Committee: "We're not bums and we don't like to be called bums. We'd like to show Mr. Nixon that we can work within the system."

The new coalescence of the young represented a movement from the left back toward the center, toward the principle of effecting change within the system. And the almost awesome pervasiveness of the student uprising, with its new sense of outrage, imparted, for the moment, a truculent confidence.