THE ABORTIVE PEOPLE'S REVOLUTION OF MAY SECOND (1954)
William A. Wisdom

The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) had scheduled their big parade for May 2, 1954--May 2, I suspect, in juxtaposition to the celebration of the international labor movement (and widely associated with Communism) on May 1. I don't know where the parade began. But it was scheduled to enter the Wesleyan campus at High and Washington Streets, proceed along High Street to Wyllys Avenue, turn right on Wyllys and left onto Andrus field, where the ceremonies were to be held. A set of police barricades stood across High Street just beyond Wyllys to mark the turn. And people, mostly students, stood along both sides of High Street and behind the barricades.

Meanwhile, a handful of John Wesley Club members stood at the side of High Street somewhere between the John Wes house (which is now the Center for African American Studies and the Malcolm X House) and the Health Center. On the other side of the street was a lone policeman, looking rather bored.

At some point--before the parade, I suspect--one or more of the John Wes members had filled the space between the two chimneys of the John Wes House with a huge red banner, maybe four feet wide and ten feet long. Independently, a student had unfurled a souvenir Nazi flag from a second or third floor window of a dormitory next to Olin Library and overlooking Andrus Field, this an expression of his thoughts about the VFW ideology.

And so it went: marching bands, VFW and perhaps American Legion units, perhaps some active military units, Boy Scouts, school groups, at least one tank and perhaps some artillery, color guards, and so on.

Then things turned interesting. At a long break part-way into the parade--the break having been caused, no doubt, by a delay at Washington Street, perhaps to allow backed-up traffic to move--the barricades across High Street at Wyllys found themselves across Wyllys Avenue, with spectators lining High Street along both sides for some distance. The tardy parade units hurried along, having lost sight of the parade ahead. Of course they went straight past Wyllys, on down High Street, and may still be marching out of town today for all I know. What I do know is that the parade was disrupted and the ceremonies never took place--though the earlier part of the parade milled around on Andrus Field in confusion, under the very conspicuous Nazi flag, getting angrier and angrier at...they knew not what, save the hated flag.

When the barricades had been moved and the parade rerouted, one John Wes member who had witnessed the goings-on ran back to tell those of us at the John Wes House what had happened. We clustered around him on the lawn--on the John Wes side of the sidewalk, not at curbside--to hear his report. Then suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a very large policeman came up, snatched the baseball cap from his head, threw it on the ground, and bellowed: "Take your hat off when the flag goes by!"

We had been entirely unaware of what was happening on the street while we attended to the messenger in a tight circle around him. This policeman's effort to enforce gestures of loyalty by what seemed, to me at least, the threat of force enraged us all. Several of us--perhaps four or five, I don't recall--went into the dorm, clamped hats on our heads, and stood defiantly at curbside as the parade continued past us. By this time there was not one policeman across the street, but six or eight, looking very menacingly at us. That was the end of our part of the story that day. I heard that a student elsewhere shot a water pistol at a tank, but that's just rumor.

My recollection of the next phase of the story is hazy. The town -- at least the veterans' portion of it -- was in an uproar, and pressured the administration to do something punitive. For the most part, the administration didn't know who did what. But they did want students who'd been involved to identify themselves. I don't recall what the excuse was. But I and several others did acknowledge in the following days what we had done. The hat-wearers felt comfortable enough in "confessing", since we had been defying the thuggery of one policeman, and certainly not the flag or the VFW.

But that's not the way others saw it, apparently. Within a few days, eight students -- none of them barricade-movers, but one alleged to be a tank-shooter -- were told that warrants had been issued for our arrest on charges of inciting to riot or disturbing the peace or some such thing, and that we would be apprehended if we didn't pick up the warrants in person at the police station or the courthouse--I forget which. By this time we had engaged a lawyer, who advised us not further to aggravate the situation, but rather to pick up the warrants, which we did.

A court date was set, and on our lawyer's advice we pleaded nolo contendere, effectively acknowledging that we had committed the specific acts that occasioned the charge, but not acknowledging guilt. Before declaring us guilty, the judge lectured us for perhaps fifteen minutes on the importance of loyalty to our great nation, and reverence for the flag for which so many brave soldiers had died. He then demanded that each of us, arrayed in a line before him, tell him what the flag meant to us.

I was near the beginning of the line, and so had little time to collect my thoughts. So I mumbled some inane platitudes about Old Glory. But farther down the line was a student who had organized his remarks, to the following effect. "I used to think that the flag symbolized freedom: the freedom to express ourselves openly without fear of repression. But I now know that that's not so--at least not in Middletown, Connecticut. Here it seems to symbolize the right to express only such thoughts as are approved by the police." That was the gist of it; he went on at some eloquent length in that same vein. I felt ashamed of my own clumsy remarks, and enormously proud of him.

Well, we were found guilty and each fined five dollars. But that was not the end of the punishment. For whatever reason, the administration saw fit to suspend each of us for two weeks, apparently indifferent to what we had really been up to. Of course this was simply scapegoating. The VFW and others in town were still crying for blood, and the eight of us were the obvious candidates.

I have recently heard that the student who displayed the Nazi flag over Andrus Field was not one of the eight convicted and suspended, but that, as a sign of sympathy with the rest of us, he suspended himself for two weeks also. I don't know whether that was foolish or noble (if true).

The students and faculty members closest to us were at the very least kind and understanding upon our return. One faculty member of whom we were all particularly fond dubbed us the heroes of "The Abortive Peoples' Revolution of May Second".

Copyright © 2005, William A. Wisdom