The Final Chapter: The Philosophy of Moral Guilt

When taking a retrospective look at the Sterling Hall bombing of late August 1970, it becomes essential to evaluate the morality of committing violence to end violence.

Sterling Hall is a building located on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus. The bomb was set off in the early morning of Aug. 24, 1970, and was intended to destroy the Army Mathematics Research Center (AMRC). The bombers, Leo Burt, David Fine, Karleton and Dwight Armstrong, believed that the AMRC had something to do with funding the war efforts, and this is what made Sterling Hall a target, according to court records.

The era of the Vietnam War and the United States government’s involvement in it, created uproar all over the country, but especially on college campuses. When reflecting on this era, it’s also important to note that many of the students’ parents had lived through the Second World War, which ended less than 25 years before the Vietnam War protests gained traction across campuses. Although these two wars were very different, it’s essential to realize the generational divide between the college students’ perception of war and the U.S. military, compared to their parents’.

“Sadly, because of the state of the world, the issues here are still relevant,” says Dave Driscoll, who is the Curator of Economic History at the Wisconsin Historical Museum. “There are people with very strong political opinions who for good reasons or not good reasons have concluded that violence is the only way to make their point or get their opinion to prevail.”  

Student reporters at Media Milwaukee this semester aimed to learn more in depth about the Sterling Hall bombing, while paying special attention to Leo Burt and the role he played in this incident. Driscoll, who has studied the bombing of Sterling Hall extensively, muses he can see the logic that the New Year’s Gang, which is what the bombers called themselves, had when it came to the bombing.  

“I can see the logic that Armstrong and his cohorts had which is ‘We have been trying for years now to convince the government that this war in Vietnam is wrong, and we have made had no headway and in fact the government is okay with killing its citizens,’” he says, referring to the Kent State University shortly before. “It’s like, the government will kill us before they will change their mind.”

On May 4 of 1970, before the bombing of Sterling Hall, the Ohio National Guard killed four and wounded nine unarmed college students at a rally opposing the expanding involvement in the Vietnam War. This incident has since become known as the Kent State Massacre.

However, similarly to the violence that occurred at Kent State earlier that year, the Sterling Hall bombing too ended up killing an innocent man, only it wasn’t at the hands of the government’s military or National Guard; instead, it was at the hands of four radicals who had become fed up with what was going on in Vietnam.

The death of Robert Fassnacht, a research scientist who was inside of the building the night of the bombing, makes the logic of the four bombers far more complicated.

“This particular bombing wasn’t going to change US policy even if no one was killed,” says Driscoll.

“I thought the war was terrible, but I didn’t approve of violence,” said Joseph McBride, a California professor who covered the bombing’s aftermath for the Wisconsin State Journal at the time. “I didn’t approve of firebombing building and, certainly, blowing up a building was terrible.”

This bombing did not only fail to stop or prevent the Vietnam War, it also resulted in the death of an innocent man. Many believe that the Sterling Hall bombing, along with another bombing that happened in Greenwich Village in the basement of a townhouse in early March of 1970, aided in ending the anti-war protest movement entirely.

“They were kind of anti-war idiots frankly,” McBride says. He believes that the bombing was the turning point for the protest movement during the Vietnam War. He says that the atmosphere in Madison was very paranoid for a couple of months following the bombing, noting that in the end, the bombing ended up being counterproductive to the anti-war agenda.

“I think one of the things that the Sterling Hall bombing changed was this sense of clarity, it was like ‘we know who the bad guys are and we know who the good guys are,’ and up until this point the government were the bad guys and the anti-war movement were the good guys, and this just made that muddy,” says Driscoll. “It was like, ‘can we still believe that?’”

During the sentencing of Karleton Amstrong, the first bomber to be captured, his father Horace Elon Armstrong in testimony described his son as a free, easygoing and gentle kid. His testimony also described Karleton as a compassionate individual.

“My father told me about after I was born that he listened on the radio about the Nazi war criminals were executed; we talked about Nuremberg, and my father couldn’t understand why the German people didn’t resist,” Karlton Armstrong said in his own testimony.

It was clear, that Armstrong thought just about any act of resistance could have been justified against the Nazis, and he drew a similarity to the atrocities of Vietnam.

“I was prepared to give up my life so that wouldn’t happen here in America,” Armstrong said on the witness stand.

However, the testimony also shows the guilt Armstrong was grappling with due to the role he played in the death of Robert Fassnacht.

 “I don’t believe Mr. Fassnacht’s death can ever be justified, when I was in Canada and started to feel halfway human again,” Armstrong testified.

Frank Scarpace, a friend and colleague of Robert Fassnacht who was with him the night before he passed, describes Fassnacht as a very gifted person in many respects.

“He was a very warm person.” says Scarpace, “He was probably more sympathetic to the people doing the people doing the bombing, even though he would never do anything violent.”

Scarpace also describes Fassnacht as a pacifist at his very core.

“A lot of things were going on in my head at that particular time,” said Armstrong, referring to the night of the bombing. “There was consideration on my part that someone in the building, it was not something I could eliminate, it was something I could minimize.”

Despite his statement, according to the court files, Armstrong did see parked bikes in the rack outside of Sterling Hall the night of the bombing. He saw lights on inside, and, yet, he still lit the fuse that blew up the building.

“One thing that always bothered me is that they saw a bicycle in the bike rack there, so they knew somebody was in the building,” says McBride. “They’re culpable of killing Robert Fassnacht; it wasn’t just an unfortunate accident.”

Reflecting on the bombing, Driscoll believes it was a real wake-up call for the protest movements happening on Madison’s campus.

“Some people’s minds probably weren’t changed,” says Driscoll, elaborating that some people thought one death versus hundreds of thousands didn’t seem like a big deal, and that something needed to be done. “But for a lot of people it was like ‘this is exactly what we are protesting against, how could this be us?’”.

In the end, according to the National Archives released by the U.S Military, fatal casualties on the U.S. side alone exceeded 58,000 in Vietnam. At least 2 million including military and civilian causalities, Vietnamese also perished.

“It’s not necessary about winning or changing people’s minds; it’s about ‘this is meaningful to a lot of us,’ this is kind of a community, there are connections here,” says Driscoll when talking about the anti-war protests he attended as a young child. “I certainly got that feeling.”