It's 1 p.m. on May 5, 1970. Several hundred students are gathered around the flagpole in front of T-Hall, jabbing their fists in the air and chanting "Strike! Strike! Strike!" At the mike, philosophy professor Paul Brockelman warns the crowd, "We have to be careful with those policemen. We have to be careful with those National Guardsmen. We must be sure as we can be that we do not allow them to get into the position where they can pull the trigger." For many, there was something surreal about the turn of events that had created a fear of violence on the UNH campus that day, among not only student leaders but also the university president and New Hampshire attorney general, who would spend the afternoon in an office in the Field House, ready to call on the state police and National Guard soldiers stationed on alert nearby.

Only three years earlier, UNH freshmen still wore beanies. Girls, not yet insisting they be called women, wore skirts to class; many boys wore jackets and even ties. Dormitories were segregated by gender, and curfews (for women) were enforced. Students tended to trust that the president—whether of the United States or the university—knew what he was doing. For Jan Harayda '70, the general peace and beauty of the campus was what had attracted her to UNH in the first place. "I had a lovely experience for four years," she says, "and then the campus exploded."

By the end of the decade everything had changed. It wasn't just sex and drugs and rock 'n roll, although those were, of course, part of it. But those years—once described by sociologist Todd Gitlin as "a cyclone in a wind tunnel"—also included the civil rights movement, Black Power, women's liberation, the campus free speech movement, the first Earth Day, gay rights. And there was the Vietnam War. By 1968, more than half a million U.S. troops were stationed in Southeast Asia, with, on average, 770 coming home in boxes each month. On Dec. 1, 1969, many young men at UNH had watched as birthdates were pulled out of big glass jar on national television—"Mayberry RFD" had been preempted—in the first Vietnam-era draft lottery.

The first rumblings of student unrest at UNH that spring came when a sit-in was staged at the liberal arts dean's office to protest the treatment of a popular political science instructor. Mark Wefers '73, president of the student body, was walking across campus on his way to yet another University Senate meeting to address this crisis when he was handed a telegram from an agent for the notorious anti-war activists known as the Chicago Seven. After a five-month circus of a trial, all had been acquitted of conspiring to incite a riot outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (Although five were found guilty on a second count of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, the convictions would later be overturned on appeal.) Seizing the opportunity to awaken the placid campus to some of the burning issues of the day, Wefers quickly arranged for three of the seven to speak at UNH on May 5 for a fee of $5,000.

The Chicago Three, as they became known at UNH, were longtime pacifist David Dellinger and Yippies co-founders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. The goal of the Yippies, short for Youth International Party, was to build an anarchic, communal "new nation." Their theatrical tactics included an effort to levitate the Pentagon with incantations (which didn't work), to wreak havoc in the New York Stock Exchange by raining dollar bills down on the trading floor (which did work), and to nominate a pig for president. Sometimes called "Groucho Marxists," they were also known for over-the-top rhetoric, such as Rubin's frequent exhortation to "kill your parents," who, he said, "are our first oppressors."

At the other end of the political spectrum, newspaper editor William Loeb III was known for his own over-the-top rhetoric. After a mid-April demonstration in Cambridge, Mass., left 214 people injured, Loeb lashed out at protestors in a capitalized editorial on the front page of the Manchester Union Leader: "They Should Have Been Met by Blasts of Birdshot Aimed at Their Legs . . . If That Had Not Been Effective . . . They Should Have Been Met With Hard Ammunition Aimed at Upper Parts of Their Bodies."

On April 22, the Union Leader printed its first front-page story on the impending visit of the anti-war activists: "'Chicago 7' Rioters to Talk at UNH/Thomson Blasts Student Fund Use." The paper reported that Meldrim Thomson, who would become governor of the state two years later, had called the use of student fees to fund the speakers "a tactic on par with the most ruthless actions of totalitarian powers."

In subsequent stories, U.S. Sen. John McIntyre, a Democrat, said he wouldn't cross the street to hear "those nuts." Republican U.S. Rep. Louis Wyman '38 described them as "convicted hate mongers" and "despoilers of our society." And Republican Sen. Norris Cotton suggested they should be allowed to speak since they would "probably hang themselves... if given enough rope."

The onslaught of news stories and editorials only helped activate the campus. "If Loeb don't like it, do it!" was printed on a red blanket and hung for weeks outside an upper-story Stoke Hall window. (Jerry Rubin had just published Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution.) What students didn't know was that John Scagliotti '70, feigning outrage, had tipped off the Union Leader to the planned event. He was part of a small "kitchen cabinet" of friends who supported Wefers and helped plan the visit.

While most critics, including a majority of university trustees and administrators, stopped short of saying the Chicago Three had no right to speak at UNH, they generally agreed that student fees should not be used to pay the speakers. Originally, Wefers believed the funding would come from excess advertising revenue from The New Hampshire and the Granite, plus other money from MUSO and student government. Citing student organization regulations, the university administration blocked the first two sources. The UNH chapter of the conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom blocked the third revenue source in court with the help of Chuck Douglas '65, a young Manchester lawyer and future U.S. representative and state Supreme Court justice.

"The bone we were picking was balance in speakers," recalls Lon H. Siel '72, one of the YAF students who filed the suit. "If they had also been booking William F. Buckley Jr., we would not have had a problem." Ironically, Wefers had actually attempted to engage the high-brow conservative icon—the very antithesis of Abbie Hoffman—earlier in the semester, but Buckley commanded a $10,000 fee and was booked years in advance.

Funding issues became moot, however, when the Chicago Three promised to speak whether or not they were paid, and the controversy shifted to concerns that they might incite a riot.

Pretty soon everybody wanted in on the act. The mayor of Manchester condemned the event, and the state House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for the university to deny the Chicago Three use of any campus facilities. Loeb editorialized that the most appropriate venue would be "the nearest open sewer."

Realizing the whole thing was not going to go away, UNH President John McConnell asked the University Senate's student welfare committee to determine if a university policy banning speakers who "advocate the violent overthrow of the government" would be violated. The committee concluded, with legal advice, that even if that were the case, the policy was not consistent with the First Amendment.

The fairly new, and unusual, University Senate—its ranks including students and members of the faculty and administration—received the committee report and voted to support the Chicago Three appearance. President McConnell also contacted 36 colleges where Hoffman, Rubin and Dellinger had spoken in recent months to see if they had "incited riot." He found they had not.

McConnell had a strong background in labor arbitration, and according to Brockelman, was an enlightened leader who "would never freeze, panic, or get all emotional or ideological." He had stated that he would make the final decision on the visit of the Chicago Three, but he wanted the buy-in of all the trustees. He prepared an eight-page report and presented it at a marathon trustees' meeting that began on Friday, May 1.

Meanwhile, political tensions were escalating across the country in the wake of President Richard Nixon's April 30 announcement that he was sending troops into Cambodia, a move widely viewed as an expansion of the war. Even as the trustees continued their deliberations on Friday and Saturday, several thousand National Guard troops were dispatched to marshal 10,000 protesters—including some UNH students—in New Haven, Conn. There were disturbances on college campuses—at Kent State University in Ohio, for example, an ROTC building was burned down.

When the trustees finally adjourned after midnight on Saturday, they had approved the Chicago Three visit for Tuesday, May 5, with restrictions. The event must take place between the hours of 2 and 5 p.m., the trustees said, claiming that outside agitators might show up on campus after work if the speeches were held at night. But Hoffman, Rubin and Dellinger had legal appointments in New York, Wefers had been told, which would prevent them from arriving before 5 p.m. at the earliest.

UNH organizers had duly arranged for student marshals wearing white sashes to help control the crowd at the event, but up until this point, Wefers didn't have real concerns about safety. That changed on Monday, May 4, with news of the Kent State shootings. National Guardsmen had opened fire on a crowd of unarmed student protestors for reasons that remain unclear to this day. They fired 67 shots in 13 seconds, killing four and injuring nine students, some of whom were just walking to class. The nation was stunned. Even the apolitical could not remain unmoved.

"We were in shock," remembers Nancy Ray '74. "We had gotten used to saying some things we thought needed to be said without thinking people were really going to die."

From that moment on, Wefers knew that the possibility of violence was not to be dismissed. University and state officials were terrified, he recalls: "You could see it in their eyes." Wefers was scared, too, but he appeared in federal court that morning to seek a restraining order against the trustees' time restrictions nonetheless. The lawyer for the trustees assured U.S. District Court Judge Hugh Bownes that his office had made "inquiries"; legal hearings for the three had been postponed, and they could, indeed, arrive and speak in daylight hours. He even promised to send a member of his law firm to Logan Airport to pick them up. Bownes issued a rather vague ruling allowing the speeches to conclude only a little later, at 6:30 p.m.

Wefers didn't trust the trustees—or their lawyers. He called his office in the MUB and asked his friends to get down to Logan as soon as possible. Driving a two-tone gold Oldsmobile Toronado they had borrowed from Whittemore School dean Jan Clee, Peter Harris '69, Carolyn Beebe '72 and Scagliotti arrived at Logan at the same time as the trustees' driver. They put Hoffman, Rubin and Dellinger in the backseat and headed north. The lawyer drove home alone.

No one is clear—or no one will say, even 40 years later—who decided that the Chicago Three would flip the finger, so to speak, at the court-ordered time restrictions and spend the afternoon in Clee's Dover townhouse, leaving only to eat lobster at Newick's Restaurant. Scagliotti will never forget the green Ford, with black-suited men—FBI he was sure—who followed their car from Logan to Dover to Newick's and finally to Durham. Hoffman insisted they sit near a parking lot window at the restaurant so the men in the Ford could watch them enjoying their lobsters.

Back on campus, thousands of students crowded into the Field House, believing the Chicago Three would speak at 3:30 in what was now billed as a student strike rally, as part of a national movement in response to the Cambodia invasion. The crowd stayed in the Field House at Wefers' urging, after he read a note from the speakers, which concluded: "There's no such thing as half a free speech. See you tonight."

Headquartered in the Field House coaches' office were McConnell, Attorney General Warren Rudman (later to be a U.S. senator), and Fred Hall Jr. '41, chairman of the trustees. McConnell mildly told the press he continued to consider the event "unadvisable," but had decided to let it go forward. Rudman said he endorsed McConnell's decision, but then alluded to the late arrival of the speakers: "We have seen the depths of deceitful conduct this afternoon. And it will be dealt with." Peter Riviere '71, editor of The New Hampshire at the time, says Rudman also told him to get a message to his friend Wefers: "Tell him to get a lawyer."

Riviere left the office shaken, noting that the Field House was "crawling" with state police. He was convinced the campus was under martial law. He didn't yet know about the National Guard units, under Rudman's command, stationed in nearby Newmarket.

It was a mild, damp spring evening. By 7 p.m. there were 4,000 to 5,000 people jammed into the gym. Fire marshals ordered the doors locked. At least 2,500 more people waited in the field outside, where the speeches would be heard on loudspeakers. If there had been no statewide brouhaha and especially if there had been no Cambodia-Kent State (as those days would forever be shorthanded), the crowd surely would have been smaller. But the event gave some focus, some action, to a time of deep grief, anger, fear and helplessness.

"To be in the same room on approximately the same wavelength with these rabble rousers, these icons, was like the cavalry coming to help out your side," says Wayne Worcester '70, who still has on his office wall at the University of Connecticut, where he teaches journalism, a framed photo of Abbie Hoffman shouting into UNH microphones.

By the time the Chicago Three arrived, it was close to 8 p.m. Dellinger, dressed in a suit, apologized for the delay, noting they had been stopped by police on the way. Actually, they were stopped by two different police units and questioned for about 20 minutes before being offered a police escort to the Field House. Dellinger gave what Wefers describes as a "brilliant and interesting" talk, occasionally responding to the audience's cheers with "Right on!" Then Hoffman and Rubin took the microphone for performances that sparked more laughter then anger. "It was like a comedy concert," says Wefers.

Hoffman, who had already attempted a handstand on his chair after taking the stage, threw himself physically into his speech. "Tonight the Granite State is going to crack!" he yelled, bringing his arm in a wide swing from above his head to the floor. "Tonight, the Old Man in the Mountain is going to blow his m----- f------ brains out!" He "used the four-letter word for intercourse more than 100 times," the Union Leader later reported. He also, memorably, referred to the Washington Monument as "the petrified penis on the Potomac."

Rubin ranted about college being "an advanced form of toilet training." He insisted the night was not about free speech, but about power, and urged students to keep using that power to close down the university and end the war. But he probably got the loudest reception when he lit a joint on stage, sharing it with Hoffman, who, according to some alumni who were there that night, offered to share it with the crowd.

And then it was over. The Chicago Three, standing in a soft drizzle, took a few minutes to talk with the people who couldn't get into the Field House and then were driven by Riviere back to Boston. The National Guard went home. The students went home. There were no riots; not even a broken window.

Not that the campus returned to normal that semester. The next night a silent candlelight march attracted thousands of students. Then, as hundreds of universities and high schools across the country closed their doors in response to strike threats by students, UNH went on strike, in its own way. Academic departments—beginning with philosophy, followed quickly by mathematics—voted to actively support a strike. So did the University Senate. A publication called the Strike Daily listed dozens of open workshops being offered by UNH faculty and students. Faculty and students also worked together on how to handle grades and graduation. President McConnell went out of his way to note that while business was not "as usual," students were still engaged in learning.

In fact, throughout the late 1960s, protests at UNH tended to be constructive—and successful. Low-income single mothers enrolled at the university demanded on-campus childcare, and got it. A program to recruit African-American students and faculty was instituted through the combined efforts of students and faculty. Students campaigned for and won the right to visit dorm rooms belonging to the opposite sex.

As Rudman had promised, Wefers was tried—and convicted—for criminal contempt of court. But his conviction was overturned on appeal in December. Today he has kind words for Rudman, McConnell and Walter Peterson '46, who was governor at the time. After Kent State, he says, "they could have locked up the Field House, turned off the electricity and shutdown the mike. At the end of the day, free speech was alive and well in Durham."

When the Granite yearbook came out for the Class of 1970, its cover featured a high-contrast black-and-white montage of T-Hall in flames. Fake flames, of course. But symbolic—and rather surreal. ~

C.W. Wolff is a freelance writer who lives in Kittery, Maine.

Where Are They Now?
Online at www.unhmagazine.unh.edu with photos and updates. Also information about "Mayflowers," a 1972 documentary about the Chicago Three visit and the student strike by Gary Anderson '69, who has just released an expanded 40th-anniversary edition on DVD.

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