of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke the story of the My Lai massacre, which had taken place in March 1968. At the village of My Lai, some 350 to 500 innocents, mostly women, children, and old men, had been killed by US troops: many of the victims were lined up at a ditch and executed. News of My Lai left faculty and students shaken and shocked.21
Governor Reagan continued to campaign against the students. In early fall 1969, he announced plans for a 25 percent budget cut for the University of California. In the spring, he intensified his anti-university campaign. As the story is told by Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, three weeks before President Nixon’s Cambodian invasion was announced, Governor Reagan made a remark that seemed consistent with his actions toward Berkeley. “On April 7, 1970, addressing the California Council of Growers at Yosemite, Reagan was asked about the on-campus tactics of the New Left. ‘If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,’ Reagan responded. ‘No more appeasement.’”22 Reagan’s remarks were quoted in a widely circulated underground newspaper, the Berkeley Tribe.23
On the Berkeley campus in the days after President Nixon’s Cambodia speech, having heard Reagan’s threatening words and others like them, students tried to thread their way safely to class through roving bands of aggressive deputies and sought to avoid clouds of tear gas, fired sometimes from grenade launchers, other times from hovering helicopters: it seemed as if the governor’s office was at war with the university. This experience on the campus went on, day after day, and with special intensity after Nixon’s Cambodia speech.
At Berkeley and many other universities and colleges, demonstrations and strikes were called. When, after the Kent State killings on May 4, several college presidents shut down their institutions for the rest of the academic year, students at Berkeley, instead of declaring a boycott or simply going home, adopted the slogan “On Strike—Keep It Open.” They in effect declared a campus-wide teach-in, asserting and identifying with the ongoing value of the university’s core educational mission. Student and faculty activity persisted even after Governor Reagan ordered the campus shut down for the remainder of the week after Kent State.24 Some classes were canceled, and some students went home. Other classes continued to meet, in some cases revising their agendas to address the current emergency. At least one class was canceled when the teacher and students arrived to find that a tear gas grenade had been thrown through a closed window into the classroom shortly before. There were daily rallies in Sproul Plaza.
Be Young and Shut Up
Some yards east of Sproul Plaza and up the hill is Wurster Hall, home of the College of Environmental Design. Early in May, students there began to create and freely distribute antiwar posters. The Berkeley poster project may have been inspired in part by the posters produced by art students in Paris in May 1968—who were in turn, perhaps, indirectly inspired by the Berkeley protests of the early 1960s. The Paris students had created what they called the Atelier Populaire, producing a series of freely distributed posters. The Atelier Populaire was the name given to themselves by a group of Parisian students at the École des Beaux-Arts. On May 8, 1968, the École des Beaux-Arts went on strike. A series of massive demonstrations was called, involving both workers and students, in Paris and around the country. According to an account by striking students, on May 14 a “provisional strike committee informs the Administrative Council of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts that the students are taking possession of the premises.”25 This passage first appears, in French, in a small book published in Paris in 1969. In Posters from the Revolution, Paris, May, 1968, a translated version appeared that included, in large format, color prints of some of the posters. Records of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, indicate that the library owns two copies of the 1969 English version, and that one of them is in the library of the College of Environmental Design, where the Berkeley posters were produced. If the book was there in 1970 (and there is every reason to suppose that it was), then it would have been available as a resource for Berkeley faculty and students involved in the Berkeley poster project.
Other lines of apparent or potential connection link the Berkeley posters with the Paris of May 1968. A famous Paris poster from that month shows Adolf Hitler holding a mask of Charles de Gaulle (see fig. 4).26 A corresponding Berkeley poster of May 1970 shows Hitler holding a mask of Richard Nixon (plate 16). Since the de Gaulle–Hitler poster does not appear in the 1968 Paris book Atelier Populaire or in Posters from the Revolution, there must have been several routes of influence between Berkeley and Paris. The behind-the-mask iconology has a long history. In the collection of the Imperial War Museum in the United Kingdom is a German World War I poster, “Hinter der Maske,” showing a lean, angry, red-faced man holding up a smiling, round-faced, white mask—a spy pretending to be a friendly burgher.27 The theme has a still longer history in the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing fable, which appears in the New Testament (“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” [Matthew 7:15]), and in a tale that became associated with an Aesop fable about a wolf, raised among sheep dogs, that reverted to type.
FIGURE 4 [Hitler tenant à la main le masque de de Gaulle (Hitler holding in his hand the mask of de Gaulle)]. Atelier Populaire, May 1968. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The Paris protests arose most immediately from brutal police attacks on demonstrating students, creating a widespread student movement that was joined by factory workers and other labor groups. A key theme in Paris, as in the Berkeley demonstrations of 1970, was to protest the suppression of free speech, as in the poster “Sois jeune et tais toi” (see fig. 5), in which a silhouette of de Gaulle holds his hand over the mouth of a student and admonishes him, “Be young and shut up.”
FIGURE 5 “Sois jeune et tais toi” (Be young and shut up). Atelier Populaire, May 1968. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The Paris posters celebrated the solidarity of the students and striking factory workers, mocked state-owned national television as a propaganda apparatus, depicted de Gaulle as a monarch, and scorned an emergency election as a mere plebiscite, after which de Gaulle would simply resume his rule.28 Several posters asserted that the struggle would continue—a slogan that still echoes in European political graffiti decades later. The Vietnam War had less salience in Paris than in the United States in 1968, but it was a theme of some posters and, according to participants, partly motivated their objection to state authority.
French thought and French student politics probably had some influence on developments in the United States, but this influence was mostly indirect and cultural. The works of existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus had been widely read in American colleges for years. Student and counterculture magazines carried news of the New Left and its thought. French cultural theory that had informed Paris ’68—for example, the Situationist International theories of Guy Debord—was in circulation in the United States from the mid-1960s, although it was not widely known.29 Debord’s La société du spectacle was published in Paris in 1967; the first English translation appeared in 1970. Debord argued that all contemporary experience occurs as spectacle, in which the dominant order presents itself everywhere—public and private, work and leisure—as normal: “The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.”30 American radicals were also familiar with British radical thought. The New Left Review had begun publication in 1960, in London, circulating New Left thinking internationally.
In
