Me and Mario down by the schoolyard: recollections of the Berkeley Free-Speech Movement - Mario Savio

Progressive, The, Jan, 1997 by Barbara Garson

The recent death of Mario Savio set me to thinking about the day Mario and the rest of us decided to disband the Berkeley Free-Speech Movement.

It was the semester after our great triumph. We had overturned a ban forbidding student groups from distributing leaflets on campus that advocated actions off campus like civil-rights demonstrations or the Farm Workers' boycott.

We had restored complete free speech and were at the height of our influence when a young man sat down on a sidewalk with a crayoned sign that said FUCK. University President Clark Kerr had him arrested and then bombarded the press with reports of a new Filthy-Speech Movement.

What could a poor university president do if there were no rules? Kerr's plan, it seemed, was to use this drifter (he wasn't from Berkeley, and nobody knew him, though I don't think he was a plant, either) to reinstitute regulations on the content of our leaflets.

It was a terrible trap. Some of us felt that the Free-Speech Movement had to defend the arrested man. Free speech is free speech. But most believed we should let it pass. We were worried that it would obscure what we really stood for. Besides, if we entered a battle on an issue that so divided us, the Free-Speech Movement would be weak, and would give Kerr the signal to roll back everything we'd won.

In the end, someone on our steering committee privately asked a lawyer to bail the kid out. But the official Free-Speech Movement itself believed it could not afford to take on that fight.

I don't think Mario cared much about the right to use four-letter words. But he was distressed that we, himself included, should be making decisions based on what fights we could "afford" to take on. If the FSM couldn't afford to lose, perhaps the larger movement couldn't afford the FSM. We must disband, we decided, and let younger people (most of us were over twenty) launch future battles unfettered. I agreed.

But let me confess to more ignoble motives. We were tired; we had lived totally public lives for ten months; the private was so alluring. Only one person had the necessary stamina: Bettina Aptheker, the completely reliable executive-committee member who hadn't dropped one class during the year; Bettina, the Communist, who would put the stultifying stamp of the CPUSA on our movement. (I didn't think to ask myself why the more freewheeling of us didn't have her fortitude.)

So for high-minded, low-minded, and just pure lazy reasons, we officially disbanded the Free-Speech Movement. The only structure left is a recently formed reunion committee.

Mario drifted around Berkeley, working as a bartender, bookstore clerk, and private math tutor.

I had a baby (Bettina did that, too), and I left Berkeley to work in an anti-war coffeehouse near Fort Lewis Army Base in Tacoma. It was good political work and a good place to be with a toddler.

But my main motive for hightailing it up to an isolated army-base town was to get away from the limelight, "the cult of personality" that surrounded me as the author of the play MacBird. I'd written it for an anti-war teach-in. I'd published it with the Independent Socialist Club on the old press we restored for the Free-Speech Movement newsletter. It sold half a million copies because we had our own networks. It was as much a product of the movement as it was of me.

So was Mario's fame, he felt. He believed in the ethic of the time, participatory democracy. He was appalled to be labeled the Free-Speech Movement's "leader," and he declined to give interviews. We would often see him striding, then literally running (he had very long legs) away from trailing journalists.

There was much truth to Mario's contention that he was not our leader.

Tactical decisions--sit in, strike, or go home and wait--were made by a vote of 10,000 at outdoor meetings. On committees deciding the order of speakers or the route of a march, Mario was one among equals, or perhaps a little less. His mind was so childlike that we sometimes had to explain to him that when the march arrived at Point B it wouldn't still be at Point A.

But it was Mario who combined political analysis with our personal need for an education and a life (as opposed to a lifestyle) that would let us do something useful in the world. He was a stutterer whose sentences and thoughts were so convoluted that, in person, it was painful to listen to him. But when he climbed up on the famous police car to speak before thousands of students, he could suddenly articulate our most idealistic thoughts simply and with no stutter.

His honesty struck a chord that unified campus groups from Anarchists and Methodists to Young Republicans and the Sorority Council. Through months of expulsions and arrests, none of the groups wavered from the Free-Speech Movement's demand that we be allowed to exercise the freedoms of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Then we disbanded. Was this admirable? Certainly, Mario was: Rejecting glory, expecting justice for all, and refusing to waffle are all admirable traits.