The Madison Front

VOTED IN 1948 by Life magazine as "the best place to live in America," Madison, Wisconsin still seemed to have it all in the early sixties: 'scenic beauty, nice homes, good jobs and a great university'. The American Dream incarnate. In those days, even the football team won.

By 1970, everything was different. A physics student lay dead in the ruins of the Army Math Research Center and the brothers, Karleton and Dwight Armstrong, who had engineered the blast, were on the run from the FBI. The fresh-faced students from the surrounding Wisconsin dairy farms were gone; in their place stood experienced guerrillas trashing bank windows and planning immediate, total revolution. Nobody, not even the frat boys, cared about football anymore.

A new documentary, The War at Home, produced and directed by Glenn Silber and Barry A. Brown, brilliantly reveals just what happened on Madison's tree-lined avenues and gracious hill-top campus. The film traces the development of the anti-war movement at the University of Wisconsin from the earliest demonstrations in 1963 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Using rare, archival film obtained from the State Historical Society and authentic US Army combat footage, Silber and Brown carefully parallel the growth of the anti-war movement with the escalation of American involvement in Viet Nam, from the sparsely attended demonstrations against the February, 1964 bombings of North Viet Nam to the 1967 protests against Dow Chemical Co. and the use of napalm and finally to the massive demonstrations in the spring, 1972, to bring the troops home.

The film concentrates on Madison; the Wisconsin capital serves as a metaphor for America. By focusing in on one town, Silber and Brown bring to the film a unity of place and time without sacrificing national significance. The selection of Madison was a wise one since, as Barry A. Brown put it, "Everything happened in Madison, from the smallest protest to the biggest bombing." The War at Home chronicles the history of the anti-war movement and captures some of its passion and humanity.

Throughout the film, it is the people who fascinate us. Brown and Silber interview over twenty individuals in the film--everyone from the chief of police at the University of Wisconsin to an aged but valiant Senator Ernest Gruening. A housewife tells of her early, intangible doubts concerning the war. Balding, thirty year old ex-campus radicals relive their moment in the sun, looking back with a curious mixture of embarassed nostalgia and pride at having been a part of the movement which fundamentally changed American foreign policy and values.

The most riveting interview was filmed from within a Wisconsin State Correctional Institution. The life of Karl Armstrong runs like a dark thread through The War at Home. Now serving a 23 year prison term, Armstrong was convicted of murder in connection with the bombing of the Army Math Research Center in 1970. He has been called "the bitter fruit of a bitter season." But his story means far more; Karl Armstrong symbolizes the progression of the anti-war movement from leaflets to sit-ins to dynamite. Clubbed at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, he vowed never to be in such a helpless position again: "If they were going to make war on us, we were going to make war on them."

KARL ARMSTRONG's words convey some of The War at Home's power and poignancy. Crisply edited and fairly short, about one hundred minutes, this new documentary outstrips any of the current films on Viet Nam: Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter. If you only see one film this year, make it The War at Home.