‘Political Winds Change so Quickly’: Lessons From Sterling Hall

“I had a class there, and I just researched the hall to go there for a lecture, and results came up for a bombing,” said Ziyad Fakhuri.

For current University of Wisconsin-Madison students like Fakhuri, the 1970 bombing of Sterling Hall can come as a surprise. The neoclassical squared-off brick building would seamlessly blend into many college campuses, and currently houses classes in Astronomy and Gender and Women’s Studies, according to UW-Madison’s online map. However, the hall has a unique history that many students are unaware of.

“I have never heard anyone talk about it,” said UW-Madison student Kendall Riddle as she strolled past the building.

Fifty-three years ago, a group of radical students in opposition to the Vietnam War targeted the campus’ Army Mathematics Research Center, due to its connection with war efforts. The group, known as the New Year’s Gang, bombed the Sterling Hall building, claiming one individual’s life and injuring others.

Once students are exposed to the building’s history, the topic piques their interest.

“I’m now teaching on campus in the history department,” said Leslie Bellais, former curator of social history at the Wisconsin Historical Museum. “I know that, 53 years later, students are consistently interested in this topic.”

Bellais curated an exhibit regarding the Sterling Hall bombing for the 35-year anniversary of the event. The exhibit contained various historical items related to the event, including parts of the exploded van that contained the bomb.

In one of the classes she instructs at UW-Madison, Bellais said her students’ project was to pick an artifact to represent a location in Wisconsin.

“I had a Korean student in my class, and she decided that she wanted to do something about the university,” Bellais said. “When she was in Korea, the only thing she knew about the University of Wisconsin was the Sterling Hall bombing. That just blew my mind. She decided to do the engine block as her object.”

The Sterling Hall bombing also holds a lasting impact for those who lived through the era of Vietnam War protests or saw the aftermath firsthand.

“The incident remains deeply ingrained in people’s memories,” said David Driscoll, curator of economic history at the Wisconsin Historical Society, as he displayed various artifacts pertaining to the bombing for a team of Media Milwaukee journalists. The items, such as the remnants of the engine block from the bombing and a shirt reading “Free Karl,” worn by an individual protesting bomber Karleton Armstrong’s arrest, have stirred emotional reactions from some of the people of Madison.

“We held an exhibit and published it online, receiving significant public engagement,” Driscoll said. “People shared their thoughts and reflections in a notebook, emphasizing the personal impact of the event on Madison residents.”

In 2020, Preston Schmitt, a senior writer for On Wisconsin magazine and himself a 2014 graduate of UW-Madison, worked on a story to gather the perspectives of UW-Madison alumni reflecting on the event for its 50-year anniversary.

“I think what really stuck with us was how indelible that day continued to be, to the people who lived through it, 50 years later,” Schmitt said. “An event that’s pretty rare, that’s an event like 9/11, something you never forget where you were, what you were doing. Maybe there’s only one or two, at most, of these events that happen throughout your life like that.”

The responses to Schmitt’s call for recollections were vast. On Wisconsin magazine received hundreds of well-written and thoughtful responses from alumni, which guided the decision to let these experiences speak for themselves in the story, Schmitt said.

“We decided to tell the story through the voices of the people who lived through it, who will know that story better than we ever will,” Schmitt said.

Dr. Chia Vang is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has taught a course about the Vietnam War for the past 16 years, and, for over a decade, she has taken UWM students to Southeast Asia to see the enduring impact of the war. When teaching her class, she frequently interacts with individuals who experienced the Vietnam War era firsthand.

“I often have people who are retired, who lived through the war, who were students here or elsewhere,” Vang said, “but they were not drafted, they did not go to war, so they had very different experiences. They would come and take my class just as senior auditors, and then they often share about what they were doing.”

Jack Loomis, a Wisconsin attorney, passed the physical for the draft but was not drafted, which meant he was able to attend law school in the fall of 1970. He arrived at the UW-Madison campus as an incoming student “a day or two” after the Sterling Hall bombing occurred. He learned about the bombing through the news.

“As a student at the law school, and Sterling Hall not far away, you could take a short walk and see the damage, which was extensive,” Loomis said. “You could just see the physical damage to the building, and the amount of time they spent fixing it, and rebuilding, and doing all the things they did, but it took a large portion of the building out, no question.”

Over half a century later, individuals who lived through the Vietnam War, like Loomis, are drawing on lessons from the bombing and the protest era, finding similarities between some modern protest movements and this particular time of political unrest.

When looking back at the Vietnam War protests, and considering more current conflicts, Loomis advises students to exercise caution when making the decision to protest, since “political winds change so quickly.”

“There is a tendency for world events to spill over onto American campuses,” Loomis said. “My big takeaway is to be aware of what’s going on, to try to find out what the underlying causes are.”

Similarly, Schmitt said his main takeaway from reporting on the Sterling Hall bombing was the importance of thinking through actions and their consequences.

“Being so strong in a belief, and being so strong in your righteousness, can lead you down a pretty dark path,” Schmitt said. “This was a path of destruction, and it may not have been what they intended, but it had some very real consequences.”

Violent protests like Sterling Hall, resulting in loss of life and injuries, caused a change in attitude for many protesters. In addition to Sterling Hall, an incident in Greenwich Village gathered attention when the Weather Underground group plotted to plant a bomb, but it exploded prematurely, killing three members of the group, according to the FBI. Some attribute these events to the decline of the Vietnam War protest movement.

“Those two things helped end the anti-war movement because people got sobered up,” said Joseph McBride, a film historian and professor who attended UW-Madison during the Vietnam War. “A lot of these protesters were liberal, and they weren’t violent people, and they didn’t want to go in that direction, so they stopped protesting the war.”

For Vang, there is no justification for the destruction that the Sterling Hall bombing caused. She said she hopes that young people will continue to advocate for a more peaceful world, and she worries about what is being left for future generations.

“I don’t really believe in using technology, the advancements that we have, for destruction,” Vang said. “I like using it for health and well-being and improving human life, but what we have seen, and we continue to see, is that the technological advancements continue to be used in a way that sometimes devalues lives, some lives over others.”

There were various Vietnam War protests on the UW-Milwaukee campus as well, including protests against Dow Chemical’s attempts to recruit on a campus, a company that manufactured napalm and other dangerous chemicals used in the war. Abigail Nye, reference and instruction archivist for the UW-Milwaukee Archives, said these protests were generally less violent than those in Madison but still significant.

One protest occurred on Downer Avenue and in front of Mitchell Hall that was attended by “well over a thousand people” from UWM and the surrounding community, Nye said.

“It was interesting because I actually showed the photograph of the thousand or so people on Downer Avenue in a class this week,” Nye said, “and one of the students was like, ‘That was really empowering; I’ve never seen that many students gathered to protest something.’”

This protest era can provide both inspiration and warning for modern protest movements. In fact, some more recent protests have stemmed from the ideas or formulas of these older protests, Nye said. As current students navigate an atmosphere of new political protest, the lessons of Vietnam War and Sterling Hall can guide them.

“We do have the opportunity to learn from what people have done before and to see what worked, what didn’t, what is applicable in our context,” Nye said.