Stan Koper

Well, "rite of passage"...I don't know. My major in college was cultural anthropology, and I tend to think of rites of passage in a more rule-bound way, something that replicates itself as a part of society. Opposition to the war was, to me, pretty far from that, and really an expression of something else, something more cynical.

"Joined" the antiwar movement... I think that is a very strange term. We didn't have to enlist or enroll or anything. If the antiwar movement wasn't "joined" as a fixed entity, one merely "became" a part of (or evolved with) it. Do you agree?

Yes, I do. I don't have a clear memory of how I wound up at the University of Michigan's student union, amidst a whole group of people (at least a couple of hundred) discussing organizing the Vietnam War teach-in. I think one of my anthropology professors, Marshall Sahlins, was involved, and I may have been there as a result of a mention in one of his classes. I don't recall being there with anyone I knew at that time. Mostly I recall being negatively impressed at how much time was being wasted by people posturing. One person would get up and launch some long-winded diatribe, and someone else would get up and counter that, and it really didn't have anything to do about securing space, speakers, doing advertising, all the nuts-and-bolts things you need to do. I knew I wouldn't want to trust anything important to those people.

How did it happen for you? When you first went to the antiwar moratoria, why did you go? Was it all to protest the war, or were there social considerations involved?

I was certainly opposed to the war, because I knew it was a mistake, and I didn't want to be sent to fight it. At the same time, I believed that if push came to shove, and I did get drafted, I could avoid combat, maybe even stay out of Vietnam entirely. But that does remind me that much of the anti-war activity and sentiment was really anti-draft. When the draft was ended, anti-war activity dropped off markedly.

I suppose you studied Thoreau and civil disobedience in high school.

Not really. I took the standard college-prep line of courses, English, advanced math, "problems of democracy" (what Maryland schools called their civics course for high school students). Number one, I was something of a cynic to start with. Number two, my parents gave me a different perspective on the workings of the world from that presented by the traditional school version.>

Let me back up a bit. I was born in 1945, in Washington, D.C. About two weeks or so later, my parents moved to District Heights, Maryland, a suburb of D.C., in Prince Georges County. At that time I had one brother, born in 1942. My father was a waiter at the Carlton Hotel, later the Sheraton Carlton. He worked his way up to Assistant to the Maitre d' Hotel, and then left to eventually become banquet manager for a private club funded by the State Department (so that African diplomats would have someplace to go and not be insulted by racists). I believe he completed the ninth grade.

My mother met my father when they both worked at the Hay Adams hotel. She was a waitress in the coffee shop. [She was born] in 1914 in Greene County, Virginia, [and] came to D.C. in about 1934. She had left school after the tenth grade. She had several older sisters who worked in the hotel industry, but she started out as a housekeeper at an "old folks home" run by the Seventh Day Adventists. They are vegetarians, and she used to tell stories about how some of them ate meat on the sly, getting it from her, and making her promise not to tell.

Did your studies influence your thinking in any way?

It wasn't my studies, it was my life. My parents were my biggest influence. When Henry Miller's _Tropic of Cancer_ was finally published in the U.S., I remember reading a review of it in which the reviewer claimed that Miller was making it all up, and people really didn't do things like that. My feeling was that the reviewer didn't know anything about life, because I had heard the same kinds of stories as Miller told in his book, coming from my father as I grew up.

My father was a big fan of Harry Truman's and a lifelong democrat. He truly believed that the Republican Party was the party of the rich. He worked around them every day, and he always said that Republicans were better tippers than Democrats. But what they gave me was an understanding that there was a lot more going on than you read in the papers or saw on T.V.

I remember the society in which we were living seemed upside down -- crazy. The war seemed to be craziest of all.

My hobby is military history, and when you read *any* type of history in depth, you find out that, in the words of the Firesign Theater, "everything you know is wrong". In military history, you find example after example of massive fuck-ups, and the worst part is, people are needlessly killed as a result.

The sixties seemed like a decade of madness to me. How did it look to you?

I didn't think of the "sixties" as mad at all. I graduated from high school in 1963, and applied to the University of New Mexico. I was accepted, but found I didn't have enough money to attend. So I kept working for A&P as a grocery clerk, a job I had begun in 1962, living at home, and saving my money. I applied to the University of Michigan, and was accepted, to attend beginning in January, 1965.

My first semester I lived in West Quad, in a dormitory section named "Allen Rumsey House". I had some difficulty adjusting, as I had never been away from home before. I spent a lot of time in the common room, since the furniture reminded me of my parents living room. The dried boogers on the bottom edges of the chairs helped put things in perspective, too.

Aside from any concerns about classes I might have had (and there were a few--my first semester I was taking all sophomore and junior level courses), girls were a major issue--meeting, romancing, that sort of thing. I was one of the socially inept.

What influenced your affiliation with the antiwar movement?

As I said above, I just sort of drifted into the organizing stuff, and I didn't stay long. I knew the war was wrong, that it was unwinnable without turning South Vietnam into a parking lot. I had read Bernard Fall's _Street Without Joy_, as well as Jules Roy's _Dienbienphu_, and I knew why the French had failed. There was *nothing* to show that the U.S. could do any better.

I also sympathized with the people drafted into the war. I knew, from reading about resistance to Hitler, that it was difficult for people to go against their own government, particularly when it didn't seem evil or obviously, totally wrong about the war.

Do you remember '68, with the Tet offensive, the assinations of RFK and MLK, the Chicago convention and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? What did you think of when you watched those events unfold on the news? Do you think the madness started earlier, perhaps with the civil rights marches? With the JFK assassination?

Not accepting the term "madness", substitute perhaps "energy", or the willingness to protest, my answer would be "perhaps" the anti-war movement began with the civil rights movement.

In the fall of 1965 I moved into a cooperative housing unit (the University of Michigan had a cooperative council, in operation since the mid-30's, which purchased housing units and provided students with assistance in running them). The unit I lived in was called "Nakamura House", and was named after a former U of M student, John M. Nakamura, who had died in WWII as part of the 332nd infantry brigade, a unit made up of Nisei volunteers (with Caucasian officers). It's located at 807 South State Street, just down the hill from the main campus.

Nakamura housed 30 students in a mix of mostly double rooms, with one "triple" and three or four single rooms. Approximately 20 more students boarded there. Students elected officers, including a steward, who was in charge of planning meals, purchasing food supplies, and overseeing the student cooks. Students cooked, cleaned, and handled routine house maint. There were several engineering majors then, and were mostly of a Republican bent, supporting the war. The following year, 1966-67, most of them moved out, as they found the atmosphere to be decidedly leftist.

One of our residents was a graduate student in philosophy, Michael Davis. I roomed with him at the apartment house next door to Nakamura, during the summer of 1969. The student newspaper, the Michigan Daily, once published an editorial stating that Michael Davis was the person who *should* be running for stu, I believe.

After I left Ann Arbor for Chicago in 1970, I didn't maintain consistent contact with the people I knew at Nakamura. My girl friend took up with another guy (who she married), and I wound up living in an urban commune. The people I moved in with were not especially politically active vis-a-vis the Vietnam war. One of the residents (there were five of us) was editor of a feminist newspaper in Chicago, so there was a different orientation.

Why do you suppose the atmosphere in Nakamura changed so dramatically (from Republican to "decidedly leftist")? So suddenly?

Although a number of the former house members had been there for a while, and were ready to graduate, they could have stayed on longer. I think of the 30 residents, there may have been twenty new people the year I moved in. Thus, although the "old hands" were given the respect due them vis-a-vis the day-to-day operations of the house, the newer people were more leftist in their politics, and I think this created some tension in a more personal way. And as I think of it, there were a couple of new people whose politics were to the right, and who stuck it out for another year, but eventually left, I think because of the political orientation of the majority of residents.

I was surprised that people who lived in cooperative housing would be anything *but* leftist in their political orientation. The cooperative housing system at the University of Michigan was established during the depression years by socialists. One might argue that the engineers who preceded us were a sixties version of "nerds", but I wouldn't buy that. Maybe they were just thrifty people, and as engineers respected the "can-do" attitude that the co-ops represented.

And the demonstrations... did they seem more innocent and peaceful in the beginning? When did they get nastier?

I remember a local demonstration in Ann Arbor that wound up with the police tossing tear gas, this would have been in 1968-69. Mike Davis and I both went, but later I found out that my girl friend was very upset, because she thought I would get hurt. The thought was very far from my mind.

Can you tell me any more about that antiwar rally? Why did the police use tear gas? Were you at any other rallies where tear gas or billy clubs were used? Did you face the National Guard? What were those rallies like?

My general recollection on this one was that the police panicked. While there was always a sense of tension between the Ann Arbor police and the students, I think the overall impression I had was something akin to Arlo Guthrie's attitude toward "officer Obie" in "Alice's Restaurant". Kind of bumbling bureaucrats. The expectation was that they were more interested in busting people for dope possession (although marijuana possession was only a misdemeanor in Ann Arbor for a while), so the use of tear gas was a surprise. As I recall, some of the students participating in the demonstration pushed things to the limit, and the police got a little desperate about clearing the streets.

The university administration was paranoid as well. During the 60's they built a new administration building that might charitably be described as a fortress. It was this enormous cube of brick, with very few windows, set in the middle of a large plaza. The belief was that this was so they could see the mobs coming, and "pull up the drawbridge", as it were (actually, block the doors).

Did you attend the large antiwar demonstrations, such as Chicago in '68?

I only saw that stuff on T.V. That is, I wasn't an active participant in the anti-war movement.

However, I do have two stories: First, when I lived in the dorm, there was a guy living at the end of the hall on my floor, who was a supporter of the war. He participated in a debate on the war, with Todd Gitlin (now a Sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, I think), and another guy, whose name escapes me at the moment, but equally high in the anti-war movement.

I attended the debate, and at one point this guy from my dorm (overweight, greasy hair, alleged to be an embarasster's trick. And they fell for it. And while I thought, "those dopes", I also thought, "is that all the war is, a matter of debater's tricks?" It's not, of course, except maybe in the U.S., if you were in no danger of being drafted.

Second story. One of the residents at Nakamura was a guy named Kevin Kelly. He was the editor of the "Ann Arbor Argus", an alternate newspaper. According to Kevin, he ran the paper in large part because he could get record companies to send him free records.

I also believe that Rudd's father was a Vice President of Commonwealth Edison. I put two and two together, and decided that I wasn't going to be a foot soldier in the war between Mark and his dad over who was going to rule the world.

Now I'm thinking about Abbie Hoffman's "second American revolution." How did you feel about people who wanted to overthrow the government?

Frankly, I thought they were full of shit, they didn't know what they were talking about.

The people who wanted to overthrow the government didn't know anything about conducting a revolution. They didn't even know how to pull off a coup d'etat. Jefferson may have said that "the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots" (or words to that effect), but Jefferson did more things as president that were restrictive of individual rights, than many presidents since.

Your questions about the revolution comment got me to thinking about a sociology course I took once. I think the Prof's name was Meyer, maybe Dan Meyer. He befriended a former convict, and took him into his home, but the guy later robbed him and took off. Anyway, as part of the course, students had to divide up into groups and take some aspect of a revolution, research it, and provide a report. The assignment began with a role-playing thing in the course where, without warning, a group of students dressed in bandanas an all that came rushing into the room, firing off guns loaded with blanks, and announcing that they were taking over.

I was on the economics and planning committee, and we had our work cut out for us, given that the country under study was supposed to be some sort of South American banana republic. The thing that I most remember about the course was that I didn't do too well on the first assignments. Then some fellow students clued me in that the grading was done by a Graduate T.A., and that to be successful you needed to write to his standards (which they outlined to me), not to those of the professor. I followed their advice and wound up with a decent grade. But it was disappointing to find that grades could me manipulated in that way.

Do you think there was any sound rationale then for a revolution?

It should be obvious by now that I don't. As I said, I had read of the student resistance to Hitler in Germany, and *that* took guts. Even if you spelled Amerika with a "K", there was no way that the two situations could be equated. And I had heard all that stuff about concentration camps for political prisoners prepared under the provisions of the McCarran Act.

The McCarran Act sounds very familiar to me, but I can't put my fingers on the details. Can you tell me more about what was said about it at the time?

The McCarran Act was one of a series of anti-communist laws of the 1950's. I don't have the specifics at hand, but I believe it involved immigration.

How did your parents feel about your antiwar sympathies?

I have three brothers and three sisters. My next youngest brother was a CO. For alternate service, he was supposed to work for the sculptor who was working on the Crazy Horse National Monument (I can't spell his name, so I won't try). He thought he would be digging, blasting, and running heavy earthmoving equipportive of the government, and were confused and upset about my brother's CO status. But they finally accepted it (I suspect as just another of his crazinesses). They also came in time to oppose the war, understanding how useless and wasteful of human life it was. But when I was facing the draft (I'd had my physical) and asked them whether I should go or resist, they thought I should not resist. I told them that if I was drafted, they might as well consider me dead, and I would have no fur.

Were you regarded as a communist? A traitor? An anarchist?

I don't think so...we did have some avowed anarchists living in the attic at Nakamura for a while. They moved on before we had to throw them out. Weird people, dressed all in black.

Did the police ever give you any grief -- drug searches and the like...

Nope. Never a problem. In 1970 I got a job with the Social Security Administration in Chicago, and moved there. I worried that if I wanted to get my shoulder-length out of the camps.

Did you feel alienated from the American culture?

Nope.