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Today, 30 years after the deaths
of four students at Kent State, a quarter-century after the fall of
Saigon, hindsight tells even the Vietnam War's architects that the
war was a mistake–that the thinking that led the country to be
mired in that divisive conflict was fatally flawed. But for many in
1970 that conclusion was reached only through a painful process that
involved rejection of a system of beliefs that had been in place for
generations. "What was at Colby mirrored what was in America," said
Stephen Orlov '71, a playwright living in Montreal. "It was real indignation.
Everything I was raised to believe in about my country was just slapping
me in the face. That was the feeling at the time. Of course, later
on, in later years, you're able to make a more sophisticated assessment
of all of the factors, that it wasn't black and white. . . . "
For many in the Colby community, as in the country
as a whole, the issue of the Vietnam War–and what to do about
it–wasn't black and white 30 years ago. At Colby, the debate
pitted student against student, faculty member against faculty member
and the administration against activists. The war was an issue that
wouldn't go away, one that eventually forced everyone to take a
stand.
Both faculty and students supported a strike–eventually.
But not before war protesters were pelted with
sandwiches at Roberts Union and anti-war posters were ripped down
on campus. There was a sometimes-vocal minority, including Daniel
Blake '71, now a lawyer in Attleboro, Mass., who remembers saying,
"Hey, I paid for what I'm getting here. I'm here for an education."
Ronald Lupton '71, a lawyer in Bath, Maine, opposed the war
but doubted that a student strike would have any impact on foreign
policy. Lupton, a football player at Colby, was ultimately won over
and spoke in favor of the strike. "The wonderful thing about it
was the naivete that was shown," he said. "The feeling that somebody
in the Nixon administration was really going to look at this student
strike and be impressed."
Ultimately someone was impressed, if not by
Colby alone then by the anti-war protests at colleges across the
country. But the struggle that culminated in the semester-ending
strike in 1970 started small. In 1967 a small group of students,
with the support of an even smaller group of faculty members, began
holding weekly vigils around the flagpole in front of Miller Library.
Some of those students had worked in the civil rights movement before
coming to Colby. Others had never been "politicized" before, but
the Vietnam issue drew them in.
The Echo was filled with commentary on
President Richard Nixon's policies in Southeast Asia. There were
notices of peace marches in Waterville, student reports from rallies
in Washington. On-campus issues seemed to carry greater weight,
as students pressed for greater attention to be paid minority students
and studies. The post-World War II era, when students were simply
grateful for an education, was over. Students focused on problems
and demanded they be fixed. "I cannot tell you how earnest we were,"
said Anne Pomroy '70, an attorney from Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
"We were angst-ridden all the time. So we'd stay up all night long.
We weren't doing frat parties and drinking and dancing–we were
staying up all night long in the chapel with our sleeping bags,
debating something."
Pomroy said she arrived at Colby as "a little
scholarship kid from Hancock" on the Maine coast. In her first year,
there were panty raids. By the time she graduated Martin
Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Sixteen
African-American students had occupied Lorimer Chapel, demanding
that the College admit 50 African-American students in the incoming
class and hire a professor of black history. National Guardsmen
in Ohio had shot the Kent State University students, and the U.S.
had bombed Cambodia and Laos. President Nixon was denying what many
Americans knew to be true. In one encounter cited by Pomroy and
other students of that time, U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith,
then a member of the Armed Services Committee, actually presented
the Nixon position to a crowd that had converged on Colby from throughout
the state and packed onto the Miller Library lawn.
"That mall was chock-a-block full as it's ever been in the history
of the College," said Earl Smith, dean of the College and then associate
dean of students. "Margaret Chase Smith said we had no troops in
Laos. Out of the crowd steps this guy in fatigues, on crutches,
and he says, ‘Where do you think I got these wounds?' The crowd
went nuts."
While protest at Colby was relatively benign,
it was persistent. Students occupied the chapel and Lovejoy and
sat in Eustis hallways. Many Colby students took part in marches
on Washington and on the Waterville Post Office. "We took over the
ROTC building a few times," said Joan Katz '70. "It seemed like
we had to work with what we had to work with. Colby wasn't really
the problem as much as it was the greater world."
But if the greater world was the problem, activists
set about trying to change it, and it was college students who led
the charge, often literally. "Big places like Harvard and Columbia
and Berkeley had it a lot worse than we had," said Robert E.L. Strider
II, then Colby's president. "But it filtered down to small colleges
and ours wasn't any picnic."
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