The Go-Go Years Read Free

main subject of this chronicle. One might, in comparing 1929 with 1969–70, even find a certain appositeness in Karl Marx’s famous observation that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
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    Wall Street, in the geographical sense, was to become an actual battleground that spring, less than three weeks after Earth Day and Ross Perot’s Down-to-Earth Day. By Wednesday, May 6, 1970, a week after the Cambodia announcement and two days after the Kent State incident, eighty colleges across the country were closed entirely as a result of student and faculty strikes, and students were boycotting classes at over three hundred more. Most New York City schools and colleges were scheduled to be closed that Friday, May 8, in a gesture of protest, and among the student antiwar demonstrations being planned was one to be held in Wall Street. On Wednesday the sixth, a small group of white-coated students and faculty members from several medical and nursing schools in the city came to Wall Street to demonstrate for peace on their own. There they were greeted warmly by the vigorous, youth-oriented, peace-crusading vicar of Trinity Church, Donald R. Woodward. In the course of the ensuing conversations, the medical people suggested that it might be a good idea, considering the vast daytime population of the Wall Street area, to establish a noon-hour first-aid center at Trinity Church, which, standing as it has since colonial timesright at the head of Wall Street, is at the very heart of the financial district in the physical—though scarcely, it often seems, in the spiritual—sense. If Trinity would provide space, the medical people said, they would undertake to set up and man the first-aid center on a volunteer basis. The vicar gratefully and enthusiastically accepted the offer. The first day that the center was in operation was Friday, May 8—a circumstance that in retrospect seems little less than providential.
    That Friday morning—a damp, drizzly, bone-chilling morning such as New York can often produce in early May— beginning at about seven-thirty, boys and girls by the hundreds began debouching from Wall Street’s two principal subway stations, the Seventh Avenue–Broadway stop at Chase Manhattan Plaza and the Lexington Avenue at Broadway and Wall. Most of them were from New York University, Hunter College, and the city’s public high schools, all of those institutions being closed for the day. Eventually something like a thousand strong, they jammed into the financial district’s central plaza, the intersection of Broad and Wall, where they milled around under the apprehensive scrutiny of a good-sized cadre of city policemen who had been dispatched there in anticipation of their arrival. But the students seemed to be in no mood to cause the police any trouble. In light rain, under the columns of Federal Hall, where George Washington had once taken the oath of office as the United States’ first President, and facing the intimidating entrance to the great marble building from which imperial Morgan had once more or less ruled the nation, they spent the morning rallying their spirits and formulating their demands. The demands, not too surprisingly, turned out to be the same as those agreed upon a few days earlier by a secret convention of radical youth leaders in New Haven, and now being put forth on dozens of northeastern campuses. One: immediate United States withdrawal from Vietnam and Cambodia. Two: release of all “political prisoners” in the nation—a pointed, not to say loaded, reference to the Black Panthers imprisoned on charges of participating in the torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a Panther accused of being a police informer. Three: cessation ofall military-oriented research work under the auspices of American universities. Unlike many student demonstrations in the spring of 1970, this one was wholly nonviolent. Indeed, it