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ABSTRACT
Historians recognize that there was an increase in political repression in the United States during the Vietnam War era. While several accounts portray the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the primary driver of repression for many groups and individuals during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those on the left, historians typically overlook the role played by local and state law enforcement in political intelligence-gathering. This article seeks to advance the study of one aspect of this much larger topic by looking at New York State Police surveillance of the Vietnam-era student peace movement. Drawing extensively on State Police spy files housed at the New York State Archives, this project demonstrates how state and local police contributed to the climate of political repression and surveillance during the Vietnam era. While this article encompasses state police surveillance at all types of institutions, including elite private universities and second-tier state colleges, in doing so it provides the first-ever detailed look at how community college students organized against the war. Since a majority of community college students were from relatively low-income backgrounds, chronicling the history of protest on two-year campuses gives historians another angle from which to counter the persistent myth that antiwar activism failed to penetrate the most working-class sectors of U.S. society.
Acknowledgments
This article was made possible by a generous Hackman Residency from the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, and by a travel grant from the UMass History Department. I am also grateful to Chris Appy, David Glassberg, and anonymous reviewers for The Global Sixties for insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to Scott Harding and Maynard Seider for fruitful conversations about peace movements. I dedicate this article to the memory of friend and fellow historian Christopher Niebuhr (1934-2018), who sparked my interest in New York State history.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Prior to administrative reorganization in 1969, Troop C had responsibility for monitoring dissent at UCCC, SUNY-New Paltz, and other Ulster County colleges. Thereafter, Troop F Special Services branch assumed the role.
2. Case 238–880-1, n.d. [prob. Jul. 1969], Box 89, New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation Reports, Non-Criminal Investigations Files, New York State Troopers Files, New York State Archives, Albany, New York (hereafter New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files).
3. “State Police, Division of,” FY 2020 Executive Budget, January 15 2019, https://on.ny.gov/2Nqb8cc.
4. Davis, Assault on the Left, 107.
5. Medsger, The Burglary, 231–2. According to one account, the FBI had phone taps in places at a quarter of all college and university campuses. Sale, SDS, 646.
6. Buhle, “Peace Movement,” 571.
7. Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 157.
8. Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 298–305.
9. Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, 507.
10. Egleson, “Surveillance Apparatus,” 17.
11. The history of red squads troubles the taken-for-granted view of policing as a means of preventing and controlling crime, showing that law enforcement also serves to control dissent and silence those who challenge the status quo. A small sampling of valuable contributions by historians to our knowledge of how policing reinforces the dominant political, racial and economic order includes Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2019); Marisol LeBrón, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (Univ. of California Press, 2019); Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2017); Daniel S. Chard, “Rallying for Repression: Police Terror, ‘Law-and-Order’ Politics, and the Decline of Maine’s Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” The Sixties 5, no. 1 (2012): 47–73; and Edward Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999.) New scholarship has also helped advance our understanding of how class conflict drove the development of a major twentieth century innovation: statewide police agencies. Bechtel’s landmark study had shown that business and political elites led legislative campaigns to establish state police agencies, seeing them as a more effective means of policing labor disputes than local officers (who were often sympathetic to striking workers.) But he failed to address why the state police model lost support after 1915, when more states began adopting a highway patrol whose authority was limited to enforcing traffic and road safety laws. Bechtel, State Police in the United States. Combining quantitative analysis with narrative history, Paul Musgrave suggests that the history of labor’s “almost unremitting skepticism and hostility” toward state police perhaps explains why highway patrols – with their more limited authority to police strikes – found wider acceptance as the years progressed.
12. In 1977, not long after the Special Services detail curtailed its operations, a Special Task Force of the New York State Assembly found that a gross lack of oversight enabled the NYSP to “develop a system of intelligence that essentially surveilled ideas.” NYS Report, 49–50. For additional evidence suggesting that similar conditions enabled red squads to flourish in Los Angeles and other cities, see Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 245–289.
Balto, qtd. in presentation to graduate seminar, “Rise of the Carceral State,” October 15 2020, from author’s notes.
13. Correia and Wall, Police, 134.
14. While dated, the most important work in the field remains Donner, Protectors of Privilege. However, Donner focused almost exclusively on large urban police units and gave limited attention to the political surveillance operations of state police agencies. Notable studies since then remain mostly unpublished and include McClellan, “Policing the Red Scare”; Schertzing, “Against All Enemies and Opposers Whatever,” esp. 323–376; and Murrell, “Hunting Reds in Oregon, 1935–1939.”
15. Gaddy, Scope of Organized Student Protest in Junior Colleges, ix.
16. Latner, ““Agrarians or Anarchists?”.
17. Petersend, “Community Colleges.” In 1965, fifty-five percent of the nation’s community college students were from working-class backgrounds. Jerome Karabel, “Community Colleges and Social Stratification,” Harvard Educational Review 42, no. 4 (1972): 527.
18. Gaddy, The Scope of Organized Student Protest in Junior Colleges, 15. Although these protests were sparked by a number of different causes, student opposition to Vietnam was the most frequently protested issue.
19. Gaddy, The Scope of Organized Student Protest in Junior Colleges; Peterson and Bilorusky, May 1970, esp. Chap. 4. Both reports show that protests at two-year colleges were most frequent along the East and West Coast, with the least incidence of unrest occurring in the South.
20. An insider’s look at New Left organizing on two-year campuses can be found in the memoirs of former FBI informant William DiVale, who began his career in student activism in the mid-1960s at Pasadena City College. DiVale, I Lived Inside the Campus Revolution. Kirkpatrick Sale briefly mentions SDS-related campus unrest at Los Angeles City College in SDS, 326–7. Students protested over a variety of issues, not only those concerned with war and militarism. For example, in Chicago and Oakland, community college students demanded culturally relevant curricula. See Diamond and Rolland-Diamond, “Au-delà du Vietnam”; and Murch, Living for the City.
21. Horowitz, Campus Life.
22. Heineman, Campus Wars. For more on the working-class and the New Left, see Grace, Kent State, 13–35.
23. It is difficult to quantify the number of local-level case studies of the Vietnam-era peace movement. However, some representative samples would include Clardy, “The Management of Dissent”; some of the essays collected in Gilbert, Vietnam War on Campus; and Grose, “Voices of Southern Protest during the Vietnam War Era.”
24. Peterson and Bilorusky, May 25 1970. The 1960s saw the number of two-year public institutions nearly double, from 656 to 1,100. Between 1948 and 1968, the number of students enrolled in community colleges surged from just over 100,000 to more a million. Karabel, “Community Colleges and Social Stratification,” 521.
25. The Vietnam era GI movement is the most remarkable example of this phenomenon. Despite being positioned within highly authoritarian organizations that punished most forms of dissent, military servicemembers engaged in widespread revolt starting in 1968. Most scholars agree that the degree of GI dissent during Vietnam was unprecedented in American history. Although the GI movement remains one of the least known segments of the anti-Vietnam War movement, David Parsons has recently contributed the most authoritative study of GI coffeehouse projects. Manned by civilian peace activists, the spaces – with their lending libraries, folk concerts, and film screenings – were sanctuaries for many GIs, the only places where they could consume radical literature and articulate opposition to the war away from the prying eyes of MPs and superior officers. See Parsons, Dangerous Grounds. While GI coffee houses are an excellent way to study the vibrant antiwar movements in normally conservative military towns, other studies, as yet unpublished, shed important new light on how music and theater contributed to the formation of an oppositional culture within the ranks. See Deutsch, “Folk the Army!” and Goss, “Entertaining the Movement.” For an overview of the GI movement, and an argument for its inclusion into the broader New Left, see Mottle, “Striking the Machine from Within.”
26. Christian Appy, “Exceptional Victims,” 106. For more on the mythical absence of working-class antiwar activism, see Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks; and Appy, Working-Class War.
27. See Zahavi, “Communists.”
28. Ray, “Science and Surveillance,” 226.
29. Report of the Special Task Force on State Police Non-Criminal Files, 12–13. Hereafter cited as NYS Report.
30. Ray, “Sixty-Five Boxes,” 4.
31. NYS Report, 32, emphasis added.
32. The exception being Troop T, which covered the New York State Thruway.
33. For more on employer partnerships with the NYSP, see Zahavi, “Uncivil War,” esp. 33–4.
34. NYS Report, 47.
35. This discussion draws from Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here, 285, n. 3.
36. Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant.”
37. Qtd. in Donner, “The Theory and Practice of American Political Intelligence.”
38. Although BCI agents sometimes went to great lengths to conceal their surveillance, more often they made no such attempt. Activists at a demonstration could not have missed the presence of dapper “BCI men” snapping their pictures and jotting notes.
39. See NYS Report, 52–3.
40. Rather than insisting on a qualitative difference between the forms of political policing carried out by the NYSP and the FBI, the work of Stuart Schrader encourages historians to see them as part of the same counterinsurgency war against threats to racialized capitalism. Schrader, Badges without Borders.
41. See NYS Report, 11. In its emphasis on tracking leftist individuals and organizations, the NYSP mirrored the FBI. In 1970, an estimated 95 percent of all the FBI’s political investigations in the field were focused on the New Left. DeBenedetti & Chatfield, An American Ordeal, 288.
42. Upon his death, The Citizen-Advertiser (Auburn) noted that “Cornelius’ ‘little FBI’ was modeled after the organization for which he had worked for 24 years.” Rpt. in the NYSP’s in-house journal The Trooper, Sept. 1967.
43. Hillel Levin, “Anatomy of a Whitewash,” New York, August 14 1978.
44. For more on Cornelius’ background in the FBI, see editorial tributes in the Albany Knickerbocker News and the Syracuse Post-Standard, both rpt. in the NYSP’s in-house journal The Trooper, Sept. 1967.
45. New York State Police, 1917–1992 (Albany, NY: NYSP, 1993), 48.
46. 44th Annual Report of the New York State Police for the Year 1961, 10, New York State Library, Albany, NY; New York State Police: The First Fifty Years, 1917–1967 (Albany, NY: NYSP, 1967), 25, in Series 5, Box 8, Folder 9, Eliot Howland Lumbard Papers, M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York. Although the NYSP did not always publicly report the number of non-criminal investigations assigned to the BCI’s Special Services branch, available data suggest that the non-criminal caseload also grew at a comparable rate. NYSP annual reports, 1961–1970, New York State Library, Albany, NY.
47. Case 112–48-1, August 24 1965, Box 89, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
48. Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s, 71; Sale, SDS, 299.
49. Case 112–96-1, n.d. [prob. Jun. 1966], Box 89, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
50. “Ruffo Wins Bar Award,” Binghamton Evening Press, May 1 1969.
51. Case 112–102-2, n.d. [prob. Jan. or Feb. 1967], Box 89, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
52. Case 112–116, April 28 1967, Box 89, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files; “Students Demonstrate against Presence of Navy Recruiters,” Colonial News (SUNY-Binghamton), March 24 1967.
53. The March on Washington was a mass demonstration held at the nation’s capital on October 21 1967. Estimated to have been attended by more than 200,000 people, it marked a major turning point for the New Left and the moment when “the peace movement became a mass phenomenon.” Carroll, House of War, 293.
54. Case 238–652-1, December 26 1967, Box 48, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files; Case 238–535-1, n.d. [prob. Dec. 1967], Box 48, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
55. B. Drummon Ayres, Jr., “Hershey Pledges Draft Crackdown,” New York Times, November 8 1967.
56. Copy of statement attached to Case 238–535-1, n.d. [prob. Dec. 1967], Box 48, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
57. Sale, SDS, 261.
58. Foley, Confronting the War Machine, 14.
59. See, e.g., Sale, SDS, 511–12; Lewis, Hard Hats, Hippies, and Hawks, 45.
60. Although such outsiders were not as common as authorities believed, the agitator conspiracy persisted partly because it meshed with the belief – popular among law enforcement and school officials – that students were themselves incapable of political organization and thus only protested when impelled to do so by some sinister off-campus influence. Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 23–4.
61. This and the following three paragraphs draw from press clippings and surveillance reports attached to Case 238–754-1, December 20 1968, Box 89, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
62. Knut Royce, and Brian Donovan, “State Cops under Rockefeller Kept Intelligence Files on Officials, Dissenters,” Newsday, November 6 1975.
63. Case 238–1151-1, July 3 1969, Box 50, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
64. On August 19 1968, dozens of city and state police, federal marshals and agents from the FBI violently broke up a nearly two-week-long encampment by two draft resisters in a Buffalo Unitarian Church. After release on bail, the city’s vibrant New Left community – centered around the State University of New York at Buffalo – quickly organized to support the resisters, along with seven of their supporters who were also arrested. Over the ensuing months, news of the case dominated headlines of the student press and became a cause célèbre of Buffalo’s resistance movement. Heineman, Campus Wars, 210–211.
65. Case 238–1559-1, January 1 1971, Box 90, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
66. NYSP memo, Manhattan SP to Division Headquarters, June 3 1964, Case 2379, Item 6, Box 36, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
67. Intelligence Division, Chicago Police Department to NYSP Division Headquarters, December 7 1966, Chicago Police Department, Red Squad, Transmittal Files, New York State Police Folder, Chicago History Museum, Chicago, IL.
68. Lewis, Hard Hats, Hippies, and Hawks, 80–81.
69. See, e.g., Case 238–1646-26, January 6 1971, Box 94; Case 238–880-1, n.d. [prob. Jun. 1969], Box 89; and Sidney JJ-210, n.d. [prob. May 1968], Box 98, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
70. This and the following four paragraphs draw from clippings and surveillance reports attached to Case 238–387-1, July 8 1968, Box 94, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
71. See DeBenedetti, American Ordeal, 215; and Davis, Assault on the Left, 36.
72. “The Strike around the Country,” Newsletter & Strike Bulletin, May 2 1968.
73. This and the following two paragraphs draw from Sidney JJ-210, n.d. [prob. May 1968], Box 98, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
74. Appy, American Reckoning, 87–8.
75. Means, 67 Shots, 141–2.
76. Davis, Assault on the Left, 180.
77. Peterson and Bilorusky, May 1970, 32; Appy, American Reckoning, 190.
78. Gould’s remarks are reported secondhand in an internal memo by the president of North Country Community College, attached to Case 238–1433-1, July 29 1970, Box 49, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
79. In early March 1969, SUNY-Buffalo administrators agreed to allow a week-long campus teach-in where students could learn about the university’s involvement with Project Themis, a $20 million dollar Pentagon program using dozens of campuses for defense-related research. While administrators hoped that dialogue would calm campus tensions, the teach-in seemed to further inflame the situation. On March 19, several hundred students engaged in a night-long rampage, destroying construction equipment on the future site of the university’s Pentagon-funded research center. Students then marched into another building on campus, Hayes Hall, where they smashed doors and windows, climbed the building’s tower to ring “bells of liberation,” and faced off with a detachment of 150 Buffalo policemen who soon surrounded the building. The next morning, at 7 a.m., truncheon-wielding policemen watched as 175 students left Hayes Hall. Facing unprecedented pressure from not only the campus chapter of SDS but the student newspaper and student government, SUNY-Buffalo’s president soon agreed to hold a student referendum on the university’s involvement with ROTC and Project Themis. Heineman, Campus Wars, 213–216; Sarah deLaurentis, “Another ‘Liberation,’” The Spectrum (SUNY-Buffalo), March 21 1969.
80. Mather to Infante, July 8 1970; Mather to Whiteman, July 8 1970; Kirwan to Mather, July 6 1970; and Kirwan to Mather, July 21 1970, Series II, Box 4, Folder 19, John J. Mather Papers, M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York (hereafter referred to as the Mather Papers).
81. Mather to Kirwan, March 25 1969, Series II, Box 4, Folder 19, Mather Papers.
82. News clipping from unidentifiable source, 1966, in Series III, Box 1084, Folder 8, American Civil Liberties Union Records, Mudd Library, Princeton University.
83. Tchakirides, “Accountable to No One,” 448–49.
84. Donner, “Theory and Practice of American Political Intelligence.”
85. Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 357.
86. A cryptic reference to one such denial, issued by NYSP Superintendent William Kirwan in response to a citizen’s inquiry, can be found in a 1971 memo sent from Division Headquarters. J.A. Kaljian to R.D. Quick (Asst. Dep. Superintendent), October 29 1971, Box 60, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
87. In 1974 alone, the BCI opened more than 7,000 new non-criminal investigations – the highest tally ever recorded. 58th Annual Report of the New York State Police 1975, 18, New York State Library, Albany, NY.
88. Knut Royce and Brian Donovan, “School Aides Called Informants,” Newsday, November 9 1975.
89. See, e.g., Levin, “Anatomy of a Whitewash.”
90. NYSP Report, 47.
91. NYSP Report, 52.
92. This and the following two paragraphs draw from Jonathan Garlock, author interview, March 14 2021.
93. On November 8 1968, the Special Services detail followed Garlock for miles as he picked up area youths en route to a regional SDS conference at the University of Rochester. When Special Services lost track of Garlock’s vehicle amidst traffic congestion, investigators drove back to the Village of New Paltz and searched in vain for more than an hour before returning dejected to Troop Headquarters. Case 238–756-1, December 18 1968, Box 86, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
94. This and the following paragraph draw from Case 238–926-1, March 13 1966, Box 89, New York State Non-Criminal Investigation Files.
95. “There are many practical difficulties in building a movement at a community college,” read an article in The Movement, an SDS-linked publication. “The two-year program doesn’t provide much time for development. Also, most students work and live with parents,” which raised the stakes of confrontations with politically conservative parents. “Typical problem: one girl in the sit-in was threatened by her father with a two-by-four; many were kicked out of their homes.” David Gilbert and Alvin Horstein, “First Fight,” The Movement, Jun. 1969.
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Notes on contributors
Seth Kershner
Seth Kershner Currently a PhD student in history at the University of Massachusetts, Seth Kershner is the author (with Scott Harding) of Counter-recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools (Palgrave, 2015); and (with Scott Harding and Charles Howlett) Breaking the War Habit: The Debate over Militarism in American Education (University of Georgia Press, 2022). Kershner’s dissertation project explores GI resistance in American military prisons during the Vietnam War.