page 16

The Last Guy Out Gets his Head Cracked open

...and it's all on record

The following article, written by Ramparts Editor Robert Scheer, describes the treatment given to demonstrators at Berkeley by National Guardsmen following a demonstration last year.

The National Guard had simply closed off a large area of downtown Berkeley, arresting shoppers and protesters alike. I had a valid press pass, given to me that day by the Berkeley police, but with my long hair and all, the sergeant would not let me leave the ring. Angry, I sat down with those caught, chatting for hours, surrounded by bayonets. A cop pulled me out and [unclear: s] I was arrested. I showed him my press card. Terribly impressed, he used it to get my name and address and sent me on to fingerprinting and the sheriff's bus. Like the others, I expected to be bailed out after a few hours booking at Santa Rita (the county prison farm), and then be home for a late dinner. Like the others, I was to be in a state of literal terror for the next 16 hours.

The one-inch slit in the window of the Alameda County sheriff's bus didn't let us see much of Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center, only a lot of wire and low white barracks—somebody jokingly referred to it as a cross between a concentration camp and a chicken farm. The bus stopped at the gates and two guards with shotguns jumped on. "Ah right, you creeps, move your asses out of here. The last guy out gets his head cracked open." People who live in college towns spend their lives seeing old gangster movies, and it was difficult at first to realize that that corn and violence had suddenly become the real world. We stumbled out of the bus and through a gauntlet of club-swinging deputy sheriffs. The guy in front faltered and they hit him on the head—it does sound like a "crack". He said something like "take it easy," and they moved in on him. The rest of us made it through the gate and were greeted by the sight of 200 arrestees lying prone on a concrete yard—heads turned sideways, hands straight back at their sides, legs pulled close together. Two hundred bodies perfectly tense and quiet, but the guards walking between the rows of bodies gave proof of life as they whacked and poked the men with their clubs. These guards were the same deputies who had done all the shooting in Berkeley the week before—the "blue meanies" (in America it's always comic book death: macabre, unreal and later funny). It was getting dark and cold; the countryside was moorish and vacant; we could hear no cars moving on Highway 50 below; and the place was flooded with guards—enough to turn any organized resistance into a bloodbath.

The concrete was gravelly and it dug into your cheek. The wind blew some of the smaller bits into your eyes, which had to be open to catch sight of the guard about to whack your limbs for having moved or shivered in the bitter cold. After 30 minutes you could turn your head to rest on the other cheek. We lay there from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The fellow who was beaten as we came off the bus was forced to take a different position—resting on his knees, arms hanging at his sides while three guards systematically beat him for several minutes-one guard for the stomach, one for the back, and one who specialized on the head. (When he got out later a doctor reported that he pissed blood and that his body was a mass of bruises.) The rest of us just lay there-no one said anything, no one protested. Perhaps some tried to, but the minute their hands moved they became the center of other guards attention. "If you don't like it, do something and we'll bust you on a felony for assaulting an officer-you'll never get out." That's the threat that finally keeps you in line.

While my body had suddenly become very important because it was vulnerable to pain, my mind floated elsewhere, giddy and irrelevant. All this time I thought of James Reston and Max Lerner and the other good, rational men. I began to compose an open letter to Reston. "Dear Scotty," it went, "This letter concerns your column holding the New Left responsible for the increase of violence in American society. You condemned the New Left for its distrust of the legal system. Remember? It's the column that had the cute line about the New Left kids being neo-Nazi crybabies who won't pay their dues. Well, before I get into those arguments, Scotty, why don't you try paying some dues? 'Lie down on this concrete floor, motherfucker, hands back, legs together,' as the guards here say. 'Come on, creep faggot, get your ass down there, cheek to the stone, keep your hands out-what are you doing, masturbating? Move your head and I crack it open ... at Santa Rita we shoot to kill.' Sorry, Scotty, have to run now. There's this guard talking to me."

The guard is, like most all the other guards, a stocky, nasty redneck (except that he's enamel white—not enough sun in Northern California). Like most of the younger ones, he was let out of the Marines six months early to enter this profession. He seems to have only two comments to make about life. One is, "We shoot to kill in Santa Rita," and the other is, "Creep, I split heads." He has been commenting on life for two hours, and now his club is two inches from my nose. Do I want to go wee-wee? It's a good thing, a favor, a release. My head won't be cracked, nor will I be shot—on the contrary, five of us are getting to go to the bathroom. One cannot simply walk in and piss in the latrine, for there seems to be an elaborate and well-established ritual which the fat, middle-aged latrine guard is bent on following. It requires that one first sit in line, three feet from the latrine, and observe a good two minutes of silent reflection. Then the fat guard has us all jump to and line up on three sides of the small box to piss on signal and, unavoidably, on each other.

At 8:34 p.m. we are given a minute's exercise running in place. Soon we are allowed to sit, hands clasped, no talking—nirvana. At 10 p.m. They run us, shivering, into a barracks-height to a double bunk—and it is rumored that a doctor has blocked the guards' fervent and often expressed wish that we freeze to death out in the compound.

During all this, they are calling out names for booking. Booking is blessed, because until one is booked he cannot be bailed. I am not booked until early the next morning. We are kept in the barracks from 10 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. Three lawyers arrive and there are wild cheers from inmates. The guards snarl but hold their clubs. Kids are afraid to talk too freely to the lawyers with the guards watching.

One lawyer talks too much to an inmate and is himself made an inmate (charged with interfering . . . etc.). The other lawyers leave and the guards snap back to viciousness, making up for the 20 minutes they've lost. The guards don't want to see any closed eyes—no sleeping. If eyes close, you get a rap on your bunk or self. "Yes, sir," you say. If not, then outside to be beaten and lie face down in the cold. The ACLU green card had said, "You have the right to call counsel." Later another kid asks whether he will get to call a lawyer. "You say something, creep? Come here, creep." He too is hauled out and hit. Fuck the ACLU green card. Survive. You forget your rights and concentrate on the main problem, keeping your eyes open—10 p.m. to 4:30 a.m.—and pray for booking. Most are already called and we get desperate as our numbers decline. Finally our turn comes—five names called-up against the fence—nasty redheaded pig makes us, trot, whacking the last guy.

The booking hut is all efficiency—lots of deputy sheriffs, five typewriters going, fingerprinting and searching. You start by sitting on the floor, once again hands clasped in front, eyes riveted ahead "or well rip them out and paste them up there." Scrape along on ass, still sitting, from stop to stop—first stop is for searching again. "Stand up, hands against wall, feet back. No, creep. Like this." One's head is then thumped hard against the wall, legs kicked back, pig hand searching entire body. The mind is by now too tired for outrage. Back down on the floor, we scrape along on our bottoms to the next station, then up again, heels together at attention, answering questions for the deputy who is typing: "Marital state?" "Married, sir." "Legally?" "Yes, sir." "Bullshit, don't he to me or you're dead. Children?" "One, sir." "Legitimate?" "Yes, sir." "Yeah. Ever work?" "Yes, sir." "You got a job, hippie?" "Yes, sir. Editor, sir." "Where?" "Ramparts magazine, sir."

All activity in the booking hut stops suddenly as the assembled deputies are duly informed that the editor of Ramparts magazines is indeed in their company. They all seem reasonably impressed and one jabs me quite hard in the back with his club. A deputy hustles me over to the sanctuary of his ink pad. It is important that my fingerprints "get to Washington quickly," he tells another pig. Then it's back on the floor, eyes straight ahead, to be given a bologna sandwich and a small container of milk—the first food or drink we've had in 15 hours. Because I am the editor of Ramparts I get to "clean every fuckin' piece of paper off the floor of the hut" before eating my bologna sandwich.

With booking finished, we're off to compound C and sleep, only to be awakened 45 minutes later. It's breakfast time: line up at bunks, eyes ahead, "move your asses, creeps, run to the mess hall or heads get split." It's Wheat Chex and watery milk and keep elbows off the table for any elbows on the table get cracked. "Hey, you fuckin' hippie queer, don't you understand English, get up against the wall." Whack-the poor bastard didn't get to eat his Wheat Chex.

We then stand up and one of the medical page 17 volunteers [unclear: Free] Church, dressed in a white smock [unclear: [gap — reason: illegible]ge red] cross on his chest, is thought by [unclear: o[gap — reason: illegible] be guards] to have smiled, ever so slightly [unclear: mile]?" No, sir." "Aren't you [unclear: happy h[gap — reason: illegible]] kid has by now had it-17 hours [unclear: is too [gap — reason: illegible]] refuses to answer and is thrown [unclear: again [gap — reason: illegible]] and beaten. The rest of us are by [unclear: now [gap — reason: illegible] knees], eyes ahead, crawling to the [unclear: door. [gap — reason: illegible] notherfucker], crawl creep. Keep that [unclear: us [gap — reason: illegible]] head of yours absolutely' straight [unclear: or it' [gap — reason: illegible]n.]" After breakfast we get to crawl [unclear: thr[gap — reason: illegible]] mess hall door and then double-[unclear: time] [gap — reason: illegible]mpound C.

It's [unclear: already [gap — reason: illegible]t] and AM radio is piped through the [gap — reason: illegible] morning DJ bullshit and [unclear: particularly] obscene in our situation:" [unclear: [gap — reason: illegible]rly,] peaceful arrest of 480 went off [gap — reason: illegible]ch with those arrested now in Santa [unclear: Rita] has been set at $800 and the police a[gap — reason: illegible] congratulated on their efficiency [unclear: and] [gap — reason: illegible] of unpleasant incidents in the arrest [gap — reason: illegible] Heyns was pleased that violence had [gap — reason: illegible][unclear: ded].." The medical kid is back is in [gap — reason: illegible][unclear: and]. Soon the guards find another [unclear: excu[gap — reason: illegible]d] him outside and resume the beating.

There is [unclear: o[gap — reason: illegible]ed] kid in our compound who actually [gap — reason: illegible] hopping in one of the downtown [unclear: st[gap — reason: illegible]n] the roundup began and didn't even [unclear: k[gap — reason: illegible]t] the demonstration, He is the only [unclear: one [gap — reason: illegible]ks,] silently hysterical and shaking when [unclear: [gap — reason: illegible]ard] comes near. I now tell him bail [unclear: shou[gap — reason: illegible]] any minute. It doesn't for three more [unclear: h[gap — reason: illegible]]er allowed our phone call, we've [unclear: worked [gap — reason: illegible] system] of getting word out by [unclear: compiling] names and phone numbers on the [unclear: outsid[gap — reason: illegible]ers's] bailed out should take the list, but [gap — reason: illegible] guy is too scared of the guards' threat [gap — reason: illegible]ger to get out. He forgets the list, but [gap — reason: illegible]kid on being able to take it and ge[gap — reason: illegible]h it.

I hear my [gap — reason: illegible]and> am in a group of ten trotting [unclear: throu[gap — reason: illegible]] with a Central European guard IIsw[gap — reason: illegible]al frame glasses and accent-barki[gap — reason: illegible] that if he had his way he wouldn't [unclear: let[gap — reason: illegible] When] we come back after conviction w[gap — reason: illegible][unclear: y] get it. Then stop, hold attention for [gap — reason: illegible] [unclear: minutes,] then run. We see normal [unclear: priso[gap — reason: illegible]] the first time and they are bewildered [unclear: b[gap — reason: illegible]arade]. As we trot around. The [unclear: guards [gap — reason: illegible]] do you love?" No answer. "Say the [unclear: blu[gap — reason: illegible]]" No answer. "Halt. Let's get it [unclear: straigh[gap — reason: illegible]]. If you want to get out, you'll [unclear: answer] [gap — reason: illegible] keep you here all week." Trot again "[gap — reason: illegible] you love?" A couple reply,

"The blue meanies." Most of us finally manage to draw the line and chant, "Fuck the blue meanies." The guards are pissed but realize that it's too close to the end to push it.

Suddenly I'm in a car back to Berkeley and for about three hours I frantically try to raise bail money for others and tell people what has happened. Then the entire experience fades out. To begin with, nobody really believes you. Even hard-bitten Berkeley radicals still hold some illusions about American life, about legal limits and public opinion. I began to consider the possibility that this was all some paranoid fantasy. The terror had worked back there because we were cut off and they had total power to define reality. Once we were outside the guards no longer existed; they were nowhere to be seen in that Chinese restaurant or coffee shop where I was boring people with yesterday's war story.

Perhaps I wouldn't have written up the "incident," but it turned out that Tim Findlay, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, had also been arrested and his eyewitness report, printed in that paper the next day, made it somehow all right to remember.

It had been real—it was in the papers.

Scheer's description of that night in Santa Rita did not end with the Ramparts article. A recording was made of a reading of the article with these liner notes by Village Voice writer Nat Hentoff:

On May 22, "law enforcement officers" arrested 480 people in Berkeley in connection with the demonstrations for a People's Park. By July 9, all charges against those 480 had been dropped. I cannot conceive of a more important album than A Night at Santa Rita being released this year and for the years ahead. It transcends all Schwann categories—from any kind of music to any kind of spoken word. Robert Scheer's account of his night in Santa Rita, the Alameda Country prison farm raises the most basic of all questions in this country. More basic than a moon landing. More fundamental than who runs for what office. The question is simply—and ominously—whether freedom can survive here. The freedom to dissent, the freedom to just speak out, the freedom to be who you are.

Within the prison farm on that night-in the United States-what differentiated the treatment inflicted on Sheer and his fellow prisoners from what they would have received in detention in Haiti, in Greece, in South Africa, in those Russian camps where dissident writers are sent? Nothing. And that is the chilling truth of this article.

A further question is raised. The guards. Is an Eichmann possible only in Germany? Was an S.S. officer possible only in Germany? What is wrong in a country that produces men who treat other men as less than animals? In the life experience of these guards, in the schools they went to, in the families in which they grew up, what fusion of frustration, fear, and bottomless insecurity about their own humanity worked to create such instruments of cruelty, of sadism?

But the burden is not only on the guards. In a country in which the majority of men do not fear to be free—and thereby do not fear those who are different from them—the conduct of guards like these would be overwhelmingly recognized as a sickness, a terrible disease of the spirit. But, if you remember, the majority of the citizenry did not condemn the riot by Mayor Daley's police in Chicago in 1968, nor would the majority of the citizenry in Alameda County demand that these guards be replaced. The guards, after all, were savaging "hippies," and "hippies" are different, and those who are different are not human. Just as "gooks" in Asia are not human and can be the first to be obliterated by the atom bomb. And in these later years, can be napalmed. In the name of "freedom."

Make no mistake about it. This country is inside the edge of another cycle of repression. It's happened before. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The Fugitive Slave Act of the 1850's. The Red Scare from 1919 to 1923. The mass imprisonment of Japanese—Americans in concentration camps during the Second World War. Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950's. And now the Attorney General of the United States asks for "preventive detention." A man is innocent until proved guilty? That's for bleeding hearts. Think about it. Take the Bill of Rights, remove its identification as the Bill of Rights, and put it on the ballot in each of the 50 states for a plebiscite. Do you think the Bill of Rights would pass today?

Think about it. Think of what happens to long-haired youngsters spotted by sheriffs in small towns in Wyoming, in South Carolina. Think of what happens to blacks and Spanish-speaking people telling the police in the big cities about their "rights." Think about the dangers of participating in a non-violent peace march in Chicago.

To what purpose? Because Santa Rita is not all of America. It is not black America, or Puerto Rican America, or Mexican America, or Indian America. Nor is it the America of a huge number of the young of all kinds of backgrounds and heritages. As Eldridge Cleaver kept saying and writing, this has to be a time of coming together by all those who do not want Santa Rita to become all of America.

A time of coming together by all those who know, as Josephine Johnson writes, that "we are dying of preconceptions, outworn rules, decaying flags, venomous religions, and sentimentalities. We need a new world. We've wrenched up all the old roots. The old men have no roots. They don't know it. They just go on talking and flailing away and falling down on the young with their tons of dead weight and their power. For the power is still there in their life-in-death. But the roots are dead, and the land is poisoned for miles around."

The power is still there in the old, in Alameda Sheriff Madigan, in young guards who are already dried and old. But there is other power, life-affirming power. The kind of power underlined by the Most Rev. Ernest J. Primeau, Bishop of Manchester, N.H.: "The mature Christian is in a sense a man in a state of permanent revolution, which begins within himself but extends to the society in which he lives. In this tense Catholic education must be dedicated to training revolutionaries—men who will remake themselves and then go on to remake society."

But not only Catholic education should be that. And not only mature Christians are in a state of permanent revolution. All kinds of people in this country, most of them young, have educated themselves to become men and women who will remake themselves and then go on to remake society.

And A Night at Santa Rita is a profound educational experience, an educational manifesto, an epiphany. I repeat. Treat this album as you would a Tom Paine pamphlet had you been in America two centuries ago. Spread the word. The word is freedom. But the odds, aren't the odds against us? They always are. But, as Albert Camus said at Columbia in 1944: "We cannot accept any optimistic conception of existence, any happy ending whatsoever. But if we believe that optimism is silly, we also know that pessimism is silly, we also know that pessimism about the action of man among hit fellows is cowardly."