On this day, 40 years ago... The Sterling Hall Bombing

[TheMightyFavog]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_hall_bombing

1969 and 1970 were tense times in Madison. Antiwar protests occurred almost every day, and more often than not, (often provoked by the police) the became violent. If one walks down State Street in Madison, one will notice a store with no windows on the ground floor. The business (At that time, a drugstore, IIRC) got so sick of replacing broken windows on an almost daily basis, so the owner had all the windows bricked up.

David Fine Fine, Leo Burt, Dwight Armstrong, and Karl Armstrong formed a group called the New Year's Gang, a group determined to bring the war home. They attempted to bomb the nearby Badger munitions plant using a stolen single engine aircraft and mason jars full of ANFO, (Which failed due to poor aim and lack of detonators in the bombs) set fires at campus ROTC facilities, and tried to burn down the Selective Service headquarters. (the attempt failed miserably when they attacked the wrong building)

On 24 January, 1970, Karl Armstrogn, Dwight Armstrong, David Fine, and Leo Burt packed a stolen van full one ton of ANFO (The same explosives Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols would use against the Arther P. Murrah Federal Building 24 years later) and parked it outside Sterling Hall on the University of Wisconsin Campus. Sterling Hall was home to the Army Mathematics Research Center (AMRC) which had become extremely controversial at the time over allegations that the AMRC was working on projects directly related to the Vietnam War.

While the New Year's Gang set the van to explode in the wee hours to prevent human casualties, unbeknownst to them, a postdoctoral physics student Dr. Robert Fassnacht was working on experiments in the basement of Sterling Hall. he was found dead in his laboratory.

The Armstrong Brothers, Fine and Burt fled to Canada, The Armstongs, and Fine were caught, extradited and sent to prison, Burt remains at large to this day (Many speculate that Burt may have been some sort of agent provocateurs)
Karl Armstrong served seven years and is now a Madison are restaurateur. Dave Armstrong served three years, and ended up driving taxis and serving a stint for meth trafficking before joining his brother in the restaurant business. He died of lung cancer a little over two months ago. Fine served three years and studied law in Oregon, but was denied admission to the Bar for his role in the bombing.

For more information on the Sterling Hall Bombing, and the events that led up to it, I recommend a great documentary called The War at Home.

[mike_c]

1. there's an excellent history called Rads about those attacks....

Rads: The 1970 Bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and Its Aftermath

by Tom Bates

From a review by Dean Blobaum:

The Army Math bombing was the last in a series of bombings carried out by a small band of conspirators, who mostly moved on the fringes of the anti-war and pro-revolution movements at the University of Wisconsin. Some leftists in Madison and beyond approved of their activities, at least until the loss of life in Army Math. The four who bombed Army Math—the brothers Karl and Dwight Armstrong, David Fine, and Leo Burt—were not politically sophisticated revolutionaries, but were determined to destroy property and take lives if necessary to make a dramatic statement against the war in Vietnam. Three of the four were eventually arrested and served prison time; Karl Armstrong served the longest, eight years. Leo Burt was never apprehended.

The account by Tom Bates in Rads is a fairly straightforward journalistic narrative which rarely strays from its story. Bates seems to have talked to everyone involved and made ample use of the archival sources. Vividly and with plenty of detail, Bates sets out the scene, the characters, and the action in Madison in the late sixties. Bates was a student there at the time.

The story centers on Karl Armstrong, the prime mover in the small group known as the New Year's Gang. In the nine months leading up to Army Math, Karl alone or with the assistance of one or two others, carried out several firebombings, tried to dynamite an electrical substation, and even dropped three ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bombs from an airplane onto an ordnance plant. (They did not explode.)

The aftermath in the subtitle is the story of the conspirators' flights, their captures and guilty pleas, and the sentence mitigation hearing of Karl Armstrong—which included testimony from, among others, activist Philip Berrigan, historian Howard Zinn, psychologist Robert J. Lifton, a dozen Vietnam veterans, and former US Senator Ernest Gruening—who all attempted to place the bombing within the political context of dissent. There is only a little analysis in this book of the motives for the bombing and its effects on the student movement or society in general. There are no footnotes, which makes the book difficult to use for further research. Rads is not theory or analysis, but a story, well-told in the main.

The bombing of Army Math divided the Left into those who defended the bombing and those who condemned it. Arguably the Army Math bombing was a key event that turned some activists away from revolutionary agitation and toward more tightly-focused movements to end the war or bring social liberation to a segment of American society. The Oklahoma City bombing could play a similar role in the evolution of the contemporary Right. On the other hand, it may be only the most serious skirmish so far in a shooting war that has broken out along a fault line in American society.

[TheMightyFavog]

2. Kick for history

:kick: