My Angry Mob Experience

Recently, on the news, I’ve been watching them -- the leaders of the January 6th insurrection making their way through the court system -- and the newscasts, as background to their stories, have been playing the by now overfamiliar images of the rioters storming the Capitol. Those rioters don’t look like a disciplined army of revolutionaries; they look like an angry mob. Seeing those images invokes for me by own mob experience, an experience with a mob much less violent and dangerous; nonetheless, it was an experience that was, for me, both scary and revelatory.

In high school I took college prep courses. Although my father had only taken a few college courses, he wanted all his kids to attend college and get degrees. For him, that degree was your ticket to success. I didn’t give much thought to not attending. I would have liked to postpone college and go off on some hippie road trip, but there was the draft and college draft deferments to think about. I didn’t create a list of colleges that I wanted to apply to and visit schools like kids do today. I didn’t know any relatives who had college degrees. I didn’t know much about college at all. It was just assumed in my family that I would attend the nearest, affordable institution of higher learning. That place was Cleveland State.

In 1968, Cleveland State was a fairly new institution. Mid-decade, it had taken over the grounds and facilities of a private college, Fenn College. To accommodate the influx of baby boomers flooding higher education, Cleveland State added a group of Quonset hut classrooms to Fenn’s old buildings. Despite the makeshift nature of the campus and the lack of residential housing, at first, I had no awareness that I was lacking anything in my college experience. Until the nation exploded in student protest over the student killings at Kent State.

Seeing on the news the demonstrations going on at bigger, more established institutions, I suddenly worried that, as a student still living at home and stuck in an educational backwater, the revolution was passing me by. But, as student dissent spread and grew in intensity, even Cleveland State was affected. There were two groups of protesting students. One group was an alliance of militant black and white students. The black students were, or at least fancied themselves to be, Black Panthers. The white students, in my recollection, were part of an extreme offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which at that point in time was splintering into factions, one of which advocated violence and common cause with the Panthers. The other campus protest group were students who also opposed the war but were united in avowing non-violence as a principle. I joined the latter group.

To understand the tenor of the times, you have to understand its vocabulary. There was the “generation gap,” which was why your parents didn’t understand your youth culture, the counterculture, and instead were part of the conservative “silent majority.” While the war was the focal point of protest, society in general, “the Establishment,” promoted injustice and had to change. Change could only be affected by joining with others and making demands and having confrontations. You had to be on the alert for people out to stop change; they were out to “co-opt” you, that is, get you to just go along, to co-operate with an unjust society.

During these times of campus turmoil, schools tried to deal with student dissent by appointing an ombudsman to serve as an intermediary between the administration and protesting students. At Cleveland State, this thankless task fell to a man named Ink. I don’t remember his first name, perhaps because I never heard it being used. When he spoke to groups of protestors, he became the lightning rod for their anger. His last name seemed to lend itself to being prefaced with an expletive and spit from the month like a wad of phlegm: “Fuck you, Ink,” “Go fuck yourself, Ink,” and “Fuck off, Ink!” It was plain that he was trying to co-opt us.

Our group, the non-violent group, met in the basement of a classroom building and plotted our protest. I was still in the larvae stage of my social development. I was just what is often referred to as a hanger-on, which is why I’m sure no one knew my name and why many years later I don’t remember theirs. I remember, though, that our leader was a good-looking earnest guy. Not the sort of guy that causes girls to tingle when he enters a room, probably because the Earnest Guy is the opposite of the Bad Boy. While the Bad Boy is selling drugs to his classmates and scheming to get into girls’ pants, the Earnest Guy is considering applying to the Peace Corp or going with a church group to build a clinic in El Salvador. He is generally smart and likeable and that, plus the fact that he is always Responsible, means he is often in a position of leadership. Our Earnest Leader discussed how we would have a stage and speakers discussing war, peace, and injustice. But we would also have a group of students who would occupy the college president’s office, present demands, and be arrested. I was up for that.

First, our Earnest Leader said, we needed demands. An embarrassing silence ensued. Sure, we wanted the war to end, but we seemed to draw a blank about what we expected the school to do. Finally, someone said, “We could demand that the school change from the quarter system to the semester.”

“Ok,” our leader said, “that’s a good start.”

“But I like the quarter system,” another voice said.

“That’s fine,” the leader replied. “We can always drop the demand later. For now, let’s get some demands on paper.”

“We should demand that the school drop the language requirement,” another student suggested.

Now you’re talking, I thought. I had flunked beginning German twice. My German speaking grandparents insisted that as a child I could converse with them in German, but such early fluency didn’t help me academically.

Once we had determined our demands, we adjourned, our next event to be a peace rally the following day. We had arranged for a stage to be set up on the green in front of the building housing the cafeteria and student union. The student union was the hub of campus activity. It fronted Euclid Avenue but had ceiling to floor windows that looked out on East 22nd Street, windows that on bright mornings flooded the space with light. That morning of the rally, the weather was beautiful. We had our anti-war speakers and were encouraged to see a good size crowd of students that seemed attentive to their messages. That is, until there was a disturbance on East 22nd Street.

With a distraction to their right, the gaze of the crowd abandoned the stage and turned to the side street where a column of students marched two by two toward the student union entrance on East 22nd Street. Black and white students, they were dressed in black tee shirts and black trousers; some sported black berets. They were the other campus protest group, the militant students. When the column reached the student union entrance, they did a sharp pivot left and marched into the building. When the last of the group, a group of only about a dozen students, disappeared into the student union, there was a pause, a silence. Then booming sounds of shattering glass. CRASH, CRASH, CRASH, CRASH!!! Cafeteria chairs began flying through the walls of glass, creating showers of shards before skidding to a stop on the pavement, finally resting in a field of glistening breakage.

Then the column of black clad students reappeared. They marched back down the street, this time pivoting to their right and climbing up on our stage. Having commandeered it, they turned to the crowd and defiantly raised clenched fists. I don’t know what response they expected, but what they got shocked me.

It was as if a jolt had gone through the crowd, flipping a switch. They went from placid rally attendees to an angry mob. They began screaming curses and denunciations of the violent protestors and in mass they began to inch toward them. Seeing the menacing turn of events, Earnest Leader cried out to our group, “Get between them! Join arms!” We rally organizers linked arms and stood between the militants and the crowd which kept moving forward until it pressed against our human barrier. One tall long-haired student leaned over me as if I was some inanimate fencing, shouting at the militants over my head. It was surreal. The crowd’s anger seemed to be fueled by what the violent protestors had done to “our school.” How dare they! I’m thinking, Your school? You got to be kidding me. Your school? With its illustrious history going back a whole five years. With your classes in Quonset huts?

Before matters got totally out of hand, the crowd was again distracted to their right –this time by flashing lights. The cops had arrived. They handcuffed the militants – who put up no resistance - and led them away, and the crowd dispersed.

That was my angry mob experience, my real-life lesson in human nature. Anyone who as a child has been bullied by a pack of kids knows that a group can drastically change the behavior of an individual. The guy who is nice to you in the hallway but joins in ridiculing you when with his friends. But what I saw was startlingly new to me, not so much a conformity as a contagion, a madness. I had by then had enough university philosophy courses to match my experience with a quote from the German philosopher Nietzsche: “In individuals insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule.” (Well, I would say “common” rather than “the rule.”) When I watched the January 6th rioters, I thought about that long ago day of protest. My reaction was the same. A crowd had become crazy! I wonder if any of the defendants tried a temporary insanity defense. Of course, our craziness back then was compounded by the madness of youth. It looked like the January 6th defendants had aged out of using that excuse.

What followed my mob experience was much less exciting for me. In fact, not at all exciting. One could say pathetic.

Back in the late sixties, early seventies, the word “in” was a suffix. We had love-ins (hippie gatherings to share love and feelings) and we had teach-ins (informal meetings for learning and discussion). We watched a comedy show called Laugh-in. We had protests called sit-ins where groups of people would sit down in an area and refuse to move.

The next day my protest group was to have a nonviolent sit-in at the college president’s office and be arrested. Here was my opportunity to go from hanger-on to being a member of the inner circle. I told my aghast mother my plans. When she began crying and objecting, I defiantly told her that she couldn’t stop me. I was setting my alarm, waking up early tomorrow and going to the sit-in. When I did wake up, though, it was well past sit-in time. I had missed my chance. I looked at my alarm clock and saw the alarm was turned off. I stared at it in disbelief. I was sure that I had set the alarm. I had no recollection of turning it off during the night.

Whether it was the school’s protests or the mood of the nation, business as usual did stop at Cleveland State. They curtailed the term, allowing students to withdraw from classes. In some cases, you got an averaged-out letter grade; in others you had a pass-fail option. In either case, you got full course credit. And they dropped the language requirement. That term, activities on campus went on in the form of teach-ins on the war and on social issues.

Despite my encounter with the volatility of crowds, I continued to be entranced by all the grandiose notions of revolution that animated the culture. It was only much later that something, something that should have been obvious, occurred to me about my own situation. Back then, I saw my mother just as my dear, sweet mom, not the sneaky person she actually could be, the sort of person who would sneak into someone’s room and turn off an alarm. When it came to keeping her son out of trouble, mom was a counterrevolutionary.

THE END