Dow Day: October 18, 1967

The morning of October eighteenth, nineteen sixty-seven, began as a protest and by noon had become something else.

Dow Chemical Company had scheduled campus recruiting interviews at what was then the Commerce Building at the University of Wisconsin. Dow manufactured napalm, a jellied incendiary used extensively in Vietnam, and students at Madison had been organizing against the war and against Dow's presence on campus since earlier that year. A sit-in had been held in February. The fall protest was planned as civil disobedience: block the building, stop the interviews, make Dow leave.

Several hundred students occupied the building's corridors. Campus administrators asked them to leave. They did not. City police were called in with clubs.

What followed was the first violent suppression of an anti-war protest at a major American university. Officers moved through the corridors swinging nightsticks. Dozens of students were beaten. Tear gas was used for the first time at Madison. Nineteen police officers were treated at local hospitals. Several hundred students were injured, some of them badly.

The university had not anticipated how the violence would read to the campus at large. Students who had been ambivalent or opposed to the protests came out of their dormitories and classrooms and saw their classmates bleeding in the hallways. The event is credited, by historians and by participants, with politicizing tens of thousands of students who had previously kept their distance from the anti-war movement.

The Wisconsin Historical Society's article on the Dow riot notes that it was a turning point, nationally, in the character of campus protest.

Dow Day is what Madison calls it now. The Commerce Building has been renamed Ingraham Hall. The university has published its own centennial account of the event, acknowledging that the administration's decision to call in city police was a choice with consequences it did not foresee. Madison never looked at a campus police action the same way again.