I felt very uncomfortable and out of place. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, and as I listened to them, I learned that many had attended the same high schools-Midwood and Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn, Bronx Science and Music and Art, and Stuyvesant in Manhattan-and had attended the same “progressive” summer camps in the Catskills. Discussions at these parties rarely concerned political issues rather, they were focused primarily on “foreign” films directed by Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), and Federico Fellini (1920-1993), among others. The music emanating from record players was Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and the Weavers. Burlap was hung on walls adjacent to prints of paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Cezanne, Monet and Manet. Candles burned in empty straw-encased Chianti wine bottles. All were filled with paperback books housed in wooden orange crates. To me, the apartments seemed virtually identical. On Friday and Saturday nights I went (uninvited) to parties in apartments in the wooden buildings in the student “ghetto” just south of the University campus. they came from families which had been connected in some manner or another with the Communist Party. Most of the students in the Left were Jewish, from New York City, and were “red diaper babies,” i.e. The “Left” was small and primarily a social and cultural, as well as political, milieu. In 1962, I transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I quickly became aware of the “Left” on campus. At the UW-Whitewater I joined the newly-formed Peace Studies Club (a ban-the-bomb group) and was the co-founder of the Socialist Club. Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, and a future leader of the International Socialist Organization, Joel Geier, among others. Flynn, who had been a member of the Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL) at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, along with the future U.S. In 1960 I entered the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where I was won to socialism by political science professor James T. Post Office in 1959 and continued to do so during the summers and school vacations until 1966. I began working as a letter carrier at the U.S. My grandfather died in 1957 and my uncle in 1959, leaving just my grandmother and me. My grandfather was a plumber and my uncle was a letter carrier. I came from a working-class family consisting of myself, my grandparents and my bachelor uncle. I graduated from high school in a small town in What follows is an account of the radicalization in Madison during the years 1962 to 1971 based on the perspective of one participant. The three most radicalized university campuses during the late 1960s were Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California at Berkeley.
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